Where people exchange money for... a piece of plastic... This just makes money less liquid, which kills the whole purpose...
Humans may end up buying something they might not actually need. Man,
just give real money,
not restricted money,
being free to spend it on what you want, not just one platform, that’s
the whole point of money and you destroy it. Conditioning that you are
receiving a “coffee gift” (Starbucks gift card), when simple money could suffice.
Recipient loses agency.
Pragmatically, money itself should be the best gift
of all (other than non-purchasable goods) because it can buy almost
anything, and one knows oneself the best, so most suitable… Yet gift
giving culture exists. Because money is impersonal, but that’s the whole point, money is supposed to be
impersonal because it can buy nearly everything!
And when someone receives a gift card, even when they don’t actually
like the brand, they feel an urge to “not waste it”: I got 2 Disneyland
tickets once, didn’t even use one because a 15 year old knows how noisy
it is, so I would say I am one of the exceptions, I’m lucky I didn’t get
asked whether I actually used them or not, the irrational feeling of
losing on something you never even wanted in the first place exists,
somehow. The giver spending effort just to make the money less liquid is not
thoughtfulness, it’s wasted effort. Being impersonal is being filled
with freedom. Gift cards/
giving gifts is just annoying! And can even be guilt-tripping, for
example claiming to like something just because it’s “‘personal”... it’s
just a subjective measure that doesn’t mean anything!
Companies love gift cards because of money that is never spent because the
card is lost or the balance is too small, or when a gift card is
combined with real money because one feels bad to leave even a small bit
of that non=liquid exchange ticket In essence, gift cards are a subsidy from
the consumer to the corporation.
I got 200 HKDs for being first in math in F5. How ironic that even some scholarships offer “book coupons”... when physical books are getting phased out. I now do incremental reading, which is incompatible with physical books because they cannot be scheduled and are read linearly (the advantage of incremental reading is high accessibility to material and also being able to schedule cloze deletions to SuperMemo to remember things.)
Sell the gift card itself for less than the purchase price? This makes it much better than what used to be near-trash. Lol. Alternatively, buy "gift" cards when they are discounted for money-saving. Nobody says you have to give them to others.