I never understood the seeming thing where a gift card is fine as a gift but cash is looked at is to impersonal.
I’ve always thought that. You are basically reducing the value of your money and giving the company money to spend without having to provide a product. And inevitably some cards will be lost or not completely used and the company benefits.
Companies see this as pure profit and people buy them, so why would they give discounts and lose that profit?
Yeah, but why do people buy them? It’s just exchanging money for inferior money.
It’s the “I need to give a gift” mentality people have, specifically old people. I have told Grandma/Grandpa that I don’t need birthday gifts and such, but they just keep giving gift cards. Because not giving something makes them think they’re bad. While companies make profit, I’d honestly like straight cash over gift cards.
It is halfway between buying something they like and just giving them cash by giving them money to spend on a limited amount of things. Yes, it is inferior money that only exists because of obligated consumerism gift buying.
There is one semi valid reason which is wanting to buy something online which you can’t buy with cash. In those cases it is also inferior to something like a debit card because you have to put a specific amount on the card that most likely does not match what you want to spend.
But on the plus side, you can (in a lot of places) buy them with cash, which means you don’t have to dox yourself / let all the ad companies or whoever know that you’re spending money on [insert thing].
(This can be a pretty big deal for some categories of stuff. We don’t spend money on anything porn-related almost purely because of that. Though the venn diagram of “hiding it from the ad companies is important” and “has gift cards” is probably fairly small.)
Another good thing about being purchasable with cash is that you don’t need to have a working bank account, etc., all that.
Probably the same reason people want to give homeless people food instead of money, to try and limit the opportunity for poor decisions.
I see a lot of restaurants around me do discount gift cards around the end of the year. It’s usually really great value if you eat there already. $100 for $75 is pretty common.
