Remember when people gave and received actual gifts? The gift cards that increased in popularity the most from 2014 to 2015 were TJ Maxx (No. 40), Chick-fil-A (No. 39) and Home Depot (No. 17). Nearly 60 percent of consumers said they’d like to see a gift card in their stocking this holiday season.
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A few notes on gift cards.
If dad is getting exhausted of the Christmas ties, and the kids already have the latest electronic gadgets, you might consider gift card, which is what 59% of holiday gift recipients are going to get this year.
There are two general types of gift cards: retailer-based cards available at virtually every brick-and-mortar or online merchant and bank gift cards issued by MasterCard, American Express, Discover or Visa. The 15 most popular cards are below, you can go here to see the top 50.
You can also swap your gift card, and CardHub provides an online card exchange at its website, along with its complete list of rankings.
The State College Police Department has investigated “several cases” of this fraud where gift cards amounting to between $500 and $2000 are purchased using one or multiple credit cards. Almost one-quarter of shoppers (24.7 percent) plan to guy gift cards because they know they are easier and faster to buy than traditional gifts, and 5.6 percent said gift cards are easier to mail and ship to out-of-town family and friends. While gift cards and gift certificates are sometimes maligned as lazy, I think they’re a great gift because they offer unlimited possibilities to the lucky recipient. The credit card research firm also said that many stores now allow one to trade in an old unused gift card for new ones, which can be used for re-gifting. Forty percent of millennials say they’ve lost a card before using the entire balance, Bankrate reported. Three-quarters of cards now offer a few kind of loss protection, though this perk is much more common on e-cards than physical cards. If that’s not an option, you may be out of luck.
What makes gift cards so popular for holiday shoppers?
What’s the CARD Act and why does it matter to gift card holders? Thieves might scan numbers of the cards on the rack and then drain the funds once they’ve been activated, according to the AARP. For the 9th year in a row, the website CardHub reports it is gift cards. (You can also use these sites to get rid of your own unwanted gift cards). If the chain goes bust, the gift card could be worthless, as the people holding 0 million in gift cards from Borders found out to their dismay.
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One thing that gift card buyers and sellers don’t have to worry about is losing the value of a gift card due to expiration.
