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Comment by thelittleone | Hacker News Reader

It's baffling that gift cards are so popular. You're essentially paying to decrease the value of your own money by restricting its use and adding an expiration date (and handing to someone as a gift as if it's a thoughtful alternative to cash).

An even more egregious case is the corporate credit card. The company dictates its use exclusively for business expenses, yet pushes all the liability onto the employee. The business gets a massive, interest-free credit line with absolutely no risk. The company gets the float, and the employee gets the bill and the potential credit damage if anything goes wrong.

</rant>

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I still don't get why my friends and family think gifting a less liquid form of money is better than just giving cash.

Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the homo economicus, that's for sure.

Same reason they gift you a book instead of a can of petrol. By giving you a gift card, they're forcing you to buy something sold at a specific store chain, not to buy more petrol.

It can also be a way to make sure e.g. “fun money” gifts are actually spent as intended, getting around things like sense of responsibility, overbearing spouses, etc making the recipient feel obligated or pressured to spend it some other way.

Because it shows some thoughtfulness. 'I know you like x so here's money to spend on that'. Cash looks like you didn't bother.

tbf 95% of the time when I get a gift card these days it's Amazon or a big retail chain, that ain't exactly a deep cut in the gift department either.

We should probably normalize Chinese Red envelopes because honestly I'd take a nice envelope with a hand written note and some crisp bills over the annoying gift cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_envelope)

Also some people struggle to spend money on themselves without guilt. Gift cards absolve that guilt as they can buy that thing without feeling bad about it

Gift cards are great for companies you don't trust with (up-to-date) payment details. Amazon, Google, Apple, whatever evil megacorp you can think of, they all have made the news with stories like these, and they have proven time and again that they will stand by and defend their arbitrary decisions in court if they have to, because involving basic human intellect in the chain is too much of a fraud risk.

Even if you like their services, who knows what they'll do when they have access to your credit card information directly. I can completely understand why someone would pay for their services with gift cards bought from a well-known, respectable store instead.

This story proves that none of it matters if your money along with your account vanish because the megacorp doesn't like your gift card for whatever reason.

In fact, it is far worse than paying with a credit card directly in terms of risk. At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back. On the other hand, I have seen too many cases where people find their gift card codes invalid.

> At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back.

Not really helpful when your account is the important thing though, you can't do a chargeback without your account getting banned.

It seems OP bought the gift card themselves as a means to top up their account balance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252989). They basically used the gift card as an alternative payment option.

Sometimes you can buy gift cards with a small discount (cash back)

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