Gift cards: a gift to avoid?
It's good advice: use a gift card soon, because you never know what may happen.
However, there's been an e-mail circulating the Interwebs warning people not to buy gift cards from about 30 retailers, stating that those businesses are in danger of collapse.
That info's a bit misleading, according to a North Carolina TV station's investigation of the gift card e-mail highlighted by Tightwad Tod over at Consumer Reports.
Some of the stores have in fact ...
... shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores but still maintain an online presence where they accept gift cards. Others are closing some locations and opening others.
Consumer Reports
"takes issue with gift cards that come with expiration dates, transaction fees, and inactivity fees that unfairly diminish a card’s value over time. That’s not the case with all cards. In general, cards issued by individual retailers tend to have fewer strings attached than those issued by credit-card companies like Visa and American Express."
Then again, according to their surveys, one in four people who received a gift card in 2007 has not yet spent it.
(photo: Doug Kapustin/Baltimore Sun)
