Gift cards as generally implemented today are awful. You pay for something now that often doesn't get used for a long time. In lots of cases gift cards don't get used at all. IIRC it's something like 25% of the time. It might be a bit less with digital cards that you can't lose, but it'll still be significant. It's disappointing that Square's offering doesn't adress this core deficiency.
On the contrary, that is precisely why businesses offer gift cards. It's because empirically some X% of gift card value never gets redeemed (the number I've heard is 10%, but that doesn't matter). To a business, selling gift cards without a discount is free profit.
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Gift cards as generally implemented today are awful. You pay for something now that often doesn't get used for a long time. In lots of cases gift cards don't get used at all. IIRC it's something like 25% of the time. It might be a bit less with digital cards that you can't lose, but it'll still be significant. It's disappointing that Square's offering doesn't adress this core deficiency.
On the contrary, that is precisely why businesses offer gift cards. It's because empirically some X% of gift card value never gets redeemed (the number I've heard is 10%, but that doesn't matter). To a business, selling gift cards without a discount is free profit.