2 ms·
The goal is to kill those payment schemes which mostly exist for exactly the reason I laid out. Sell a product for $7 but only allow "recharge" in $5 increment
by Workaccount2 9mo ago
The goal is to kill those payment schemes which mostly exist for exactly the reason I laid out.
Sell a product for $7 but only allow "recharge" in $5 increments. It pretty much guarantees that you will have tons of accounts with random dollar amounts laying around in them, never to be used. Even for regular gift cards, the counter party would be beholden to honoring them at their full value, as they should.
Besides, nothing it stopping you from rolling monthly treasuries and using those as a bank. Something people with enough money to exploit this proposed "gift card bank" would almost surely already be aware of.
- stouset 9mo agoWouldn’t it be better to try to kill those payment schemes directly?
- lxgr 9mo agoOn the other hand, microtransactions are horrendously expensive due to fixed per-transaction fees (at least using credit and debit cards), so some business models are simply not viable without stored value cards or accounts.
- Workaccount2 9mo agoIt's totally viable and trivially possible to just payout earned interest to these accounts. You can still issue giftcards, it's just no longer passively profitable to do so.
- lxgr 9mo agoIt's probably nontrivial anywhere interest income is taxed, but even more so in the US with its non-flat interest tax scheme (it's taxed as ordinary income at the federal level, with an income-dependent rate).
- wbshaw 9mo agoI don't understand why you couldn't just use up the balance and then pay the balance due via another method. I do it all the time. I believe the real scheme is how many gift cards never get redeemed at all.