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Gift cards are an idea whose time has passed. All they seem useful now is for scams and laundering money. All this plastic waste and fraud, so that a few legit
by ryandrake 1y ago
Gift cards are an idea whose time has passed. All they seem useful now is for scams and laundering money. All this plastic waste and fraud, so that a few legit customers can turn general-purpose money into company-specific money. Ridiculous product that should go away.
- Nextgrid 1y agoAbsolutely agreed. But there’s a huge “legal” scam industry around it (essentially you are converting universal, fungible currency into scrip with an expiration date and strings attached), on top of which the illegal scam industry builds on (both sides benefit off each other, so the legal side has no interest in discontinuing operations or even measuring how much of their turnover is actually as a result of illegal dealings).
- gruturo 1y agoI use Steam gift cards to load my own Steam wallet, to avoid having Visa/Mastercard in the loop since they started dictating which games can be published and which can't.
- viraptor 1y agoAnother use for the companies are the loyalty programs. I'm using the "buy for a discount from one company to use at another company" continuously for ongoing shopping.