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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

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bombcar·

A gift card is always worth less than cash, how much depends on various factors.

At least 5% (rewards and inconvenience) but closer to 10-15% in my experience.

For a 20% discount on stores I use regularly I’ll get the gift card (usually buy $50 get $10 free).

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It is, however, literally worth that amount of cash at the moment of redemption. If you were going to spend that money in that shop anyway, and you have no intent to sell the card to a third party, there's no need to apply a discount.

It's not all that surprising that "just like cash, but less fungible" should have a different valuation than "cash", but there aren't all that many things that mimic cash like that.

If you look on the gift card market places, like Raise, you will see many gift cards are well below face value but there are also many that are rarely below 1% value like Amazon and Walmart.

A $X Amazon gift card is more valuable to me than $X in cash. As in, if you gave me a choice between the two, I’d take the gift card.

I assume you mean literal cash here. I can’t imagine anyone preferring to have $20 in their Amazon wallet over $20 in their bank account

the first thing I always did when I got a visa (or like) gift card (be it rebate, class action payment et al), was put it into amazon, as it was effectively cashing it out with close to zero friction.

I'd take the cash. I walk past a half dozen cash machines on any given workday where I can deposit the cash in to my bank account and it'll clear and be ready to spend instantaneously.

Why? Just the online convenience? You can take the cash and exchange it for gift cards at a shop.

Yes, the convenience.

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