[conspire] conspire Digest, Vol 56, Issue 5

[K Sandoval]

>From Kai:
((unlearking for a moment))

>From someone who has recently had experience with gift cards and this
particular piece of legislation, I would suggest remembering the following.

With a store specific card it is much easier to get that $10.00 or less cash
back. Stores like Target, Wal-mart, Macy's, Nordstrom's, etc have the
ability to tell you what your balance is for their own gift cards.  And if
you **know** the balance you then have the ability to ask for your remaining
cash.  I know that when you use a Target gift card, the amount of your
purchase and your gift card balance both print out on the receipt, letting
you know exactly how much money is left on that gift card.

I have also had the recent experience that these stores Do-Not have the
ability to tell you what the remaining balance is for an American Express or
Visa Gift Card. The card holder is responsible for going out to the website
and verifying their balance before they attempt to ask for their remaining
balance in cash.

Example: If you tell the cashier you have 25.00 left on a Visa Gift Card and
you actually only have 24.50, when the cashier enters in 25.00, the gift
card amount is rejected with no reason as to why.  If the cashier them
attempts to process the sale with the Visa Gift Card again with an amount of
say 20.00, the sales will process fine BUT no where does it say "ok charged
20.00 with a 4.50 balance".

It is the card holders responsibility to check the website and verify their
gift card's balance.

Some cards also have administrative fees that chip away at their original
value.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/money/shopping/shopping-tips/gift-card-pitfalls-12-07/overview/gift-card-pitfalls-ov.htm

((returning to lurk mode for now))

- Kai

http://people.tribe.net/da12c6fd-0b2e-4ba6-ac41-b760bdbe9675




> begin Daniel Gimpelevich quotation of Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 10:06:08PM
> -0800:
> > On Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:39:29 -0800, Don Marti wrote:
> >
> > > Just to give you an idea, here's a law that just went
> > > into effect today: if you're a California citizen,
> > > and you have a store gift card worth less than $10,
> > > the store has to give you cash for the card if you
> > > ask for it.  If something like that can pass, then
> > > it's easy to imagine the "if they take down your
> > > DSL they have to pay you $10 per IP address per day"
> > > bill passing too.
> >
> > I have a store gift card worth exactly $10. Not only can I not get cash
> > for it, I can't get ANYTHING for it. Ideas?
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20080108/7e9e56ed/attachment.html>