Asklemmy

I can think of a couple of uses from the top off my head.

1. For parents. This is a way to control what kind of products your children could get, giving them a limited sense of control.

2. There are people that are not very generous when it comes to giving away something. Like those who won't give money to beggars because they believe beggars will spend it in drugs. But in this situation they think they keep some control on the money they give away.

In both cases, if the person is smart enough, they will find out how to make cash from the gift card anyway. However, they'd be really gifted salespersons if they can get the whole value back.

Gift cards are great for the company they're tied to because they basically just made a sale of that amount and now it's up to the receiver to take the initiative to actually get anything from the company. Plus with inflation the value of the card always decreases. Plus you'll usually end up buying a little more than the amount on the gift card just to use it all up.

I think cash is usually a better gift, with one exception: a gift card can be a way to give someone permission to get something from a store that they would really like but usually not actually spend their own money there.

For me, I buy gift cards at a discount when I know I'm going to buy at a given store anyways. Might as well get $20 off of whatever.

I was given a dunkin giftcard

Dunkin gift cards expire? That's news to me, it's been a while since I've encountered expiring gift cards. Not sure that's even legal but maybe they expire in your particular state?

To answer your main question I buy gift cards with discounts/cash back all the time. It basically makes them cheaper than using cash. For example my credit card has 5% cash back for grocery stores so that gives me 5% cash back on gift cards purchased there.

Also a lot of credit card and stores do gift card sales where they'll do 10%-20% discount, or throw in a free gift card with a purchase.

My favorite gift is a Steam Gift Card.

The only reason I buy them is cash back / rewards credit cards. Say I know I want to spend $225 on something on amazon? I whip out my visa dividends, MC world elite or Amex Cobalt at the grocery store for 3-5% cash back or rewards card while purchasing groceries, and add a custom amount $200 gift card to the tally. So now I got $10 back on it in rewards that I can spend elsewhere. The CC issuer, Amazon and the grocery store are none the wiser.

When I was a kid I remember my grandparents would just put $50-$100 in a card and call it a day. I loved the gift of just money because the possibilities of what I could buy myself were endless. It made more sense for my grandparents too as they had no idea what kids my age wanted anyway and I would've likely been disappointed if they tried to buy me what they thought I wanted.

For whatever reason now though, it's seen as lazy or uncaring if you just gift money. I would argue that this is some bs corporations have created to get us to feel obligated to buy an actual item. In my mind though, money is the best gift.

On a related note, my parents bought us a $100 giftcard one year and when we went to us it we discovered that there was a slip of paper covering the barcode. That slip of paper had a photocopy of another barcode on it, so when my parents put money on the card, it actually went on a different card. Pretty common scam we found out. When we called the stores help line, they said they could not help us. So yeah fuck giftcards. The companies themselves won't even take steps to ensure they are secure. As long as they still got their money, they don't care if scammers got to use the giftcard instead.

Depending on where you live, gift cards legally can’t expire. They only become worthless if the company goes out of business.

The rest of what you said I agree with

To show they know you, at least a bit. Cash can obviously used by everyone about anywhere, but for that reason it can be given to someone you don't know at all and they'll like it.

A gift card shows that the giver at least believes they know the gifted well enough to know where they like to spend money. They just don't know them well enough to know they would like "this specific thing" and know they don't already one one.

In my opinion, gift cards are good gifts when the giver has some idea of what they want to give, but not enough information to make a proper purchase. For example:

• for an "event" (eg skydiving, a meal at a fancy restaurant, canoeing trip, etc) where the gifter doesn't know dates when the recipient is free.
• for a specific product which the giver knows fairly little, and the receiver has strong opinions on (eg. Money to spend on PC parts without making any product decisions for them)
• for an item of a "set", where the gifter doesn't know for sure which items are already owned (eg. A board game expansion, a collectible Lego set, a book from a series)

However i do think that often gift cards are used as excuses to be lazy.

Every few years I find a drawer of expired gift cards and throw them out. One time I kept a one hundred pound gift card in my wallet for months on end, keeping it alive with balance checks in the store but never using it. My partner noticed this and said “just give it to me”, and promptly lost it forever in one of her handbags.

Gift cards are cheaper than cash. Many places will give you a bonus gift card for purchasing a large gift card, or give you one at higher-than-cash value for trade-ins.

It comes down to discomfort in giving people cash gifts. Agree that it’s stupid.

I will go a step further and say that in most cases, gift giving just destroys value. Exception for little kids, who derive a modicum of enjoyment from whatever plastic crap you give them.

They could be purchased en mass at a discount. The corporate gift card as a gift, might only cost 70%, and have a rebate if it's never used. Depending on your jurisdiction it may not count as income either, reducing HR burden. So it makes financial sense.

They're often sold at a discount to retail customers, to lock them in, a bet that they won't actually use it versus utility somebody gets from a discount. Just like mailing coupon/rebates

It is one of the more practical off-ramps for crypto, you can buy gift cards with crypto, then use those gift cards for real world needs.

In the domain of gifts, if somebody has a spending problem, or a dependency problem, and you want to make sure they buy something in a certain vertical, locked in money as a gift card to make sense. If you give a drunk $50, they're going to buy alcohol. If you give them a $50 gift card to bed bath & beyond, they might actually use it to improve their house

It can also be a form of virtue signaling, a $50 gift card to the air and space museum, or the science museum... Is both a gift of money, but an excuse to go to a new place and do a new thing.

As an alternative to using a credit card online is a good idea, as good an idea as any for security and anti-tracking if nothing else. But only if you remember to use them.

One other thing is, (and I'm not positive this is true), but people on disability can't have over a certain amount of cash. Giving a gift card makes sense in that instance because it no longer counts as cash at that point.

[off topic]

A while back I gave my friend $50 for his birthday. I got fifty 'gold' dollars at the bank and gave them in a drawstring purse [the kind Robin Hood or Conan the Barbarian would carry]

He really enjoyed it.

Wolves of Glendale have a song for this - Just Give Me Cash

This won't answer your question directly, but I know in some jurisdictions gift cards or prepaid lunch cards are taxed differently than income and that's why employers often resort to these instead of actual salary raises

Since ,my company are such sticklers about not going over our daily meal limit while on travel, and have as yet ignored our requests to just do per diem or use the total from the trip, I often purchase gift cards to fill out an underspent day on travel. An Apple Card or something for some restaurant where my wife likes to get lunch.

For a lot of online transactions, this is usually the only way people can get access.

There are a lot of people out there who don't have credit cards or bank accounts, so they can't buy anything online. A gift card to an online store may be the cheapest or only way they can pay.

I don’t know what to get you and prefer something better targeted than cash. Tell me what you want, what you really really want, and you might get that instead

— if you complain again, I’m writing you a check: tell me how inconvenient that is

When I had Netflix I registered it with a gift card.