Deachman: Stop throwing money off the back of a train — or at least give it to someone in need

Canadians leave hundreds of millions of dollars on the table in unredeemed gift cards. Maybe we can change that.

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Published Dec 26, 2023 • 3 minute read

This year marks the 30th season of giving and receiving gift cards. Rather than let them go to waste, give them to someone in need, columnist Bruce Deachman writes. Photo by Luke Sharrett /Bloomberg

While doing some last-minute Christmas book shopping last weekend, I discovered in my wallet a long-forgotten and well-worn Indigo gift card. I had no idea when or how I came by it, or if it still had any remaining value.

They’re funny things, these gift cards, falling somewhere between choosing a gift that someone REALLY wants and simply giving them cash, the latter an exercise that, strangely, especially given the bottomless commercialization of Christmas, is still considered gauche except in the case of children.

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In my case, beyond simply being pleased that I finally thought to use the remaining card balance — a little under $10 — was the realization that it just as easily could have stayed in my wallet forever, or at least until my kids were forced to deal with it when closing out my estate.

This year marks the 30th season of giving and receiving gift cards, with U.S. luxury retailer Neiman Marcus reportedly kicking it all off with their introduction in 1994, followed the next year by a similar but more widespread rollout by now-defunct Blockbuster Video.

Exactly how many of the pervasive cards are floating around is anyone’s guess, but there’s certainly no shortage. And many of them are probably not dissimilar to the ones that spent years in my wallet, unnoticed, ignored and not doing anyone any good.

According to the 2023 Retail Council of Canada/Leger holiday shopping survey of 2,500 Canadians, conducted online last summer, 45 per cent of consumers expected to buy gift cards over the Christmas holidays, each planning to spend about 16 per cent of their gift-giving budget on the things.

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It’s difficult to imagine a product or service that can’t be given via a gift card, from grocery store chains to restaurants to gas stations and so much more. You can even purchase gift cards from Molly Maid home cleaners, a thoughtfully kind if also somewhat non-passively judgmental present.

What keeps me thinking about them, though, isn’t their ubiquity, but rather the waste of all the unused ones.

Canadian retail advisor Doug Stephens this year estimated that gift card revenue in this country was about $3.5 billion, and growing at an annual rate of between five and eight per cent. That’s a lot of plastic, which, not to rain on everyone’s Santa Claus parade, raises the issue of their ecological impact.

Assuming that my kitchen scale and math pencil are accurate, if every Canadian had just one plastic gift card in their wallet, that would amount to about 350,000 pounds, or close to 160 tonnes, of plastic. That may barely be a drop compared to the Great Pacific garbage patch, say, but it’s still nothing to brag about.

Stephens estimates that between 10 and 20 per cent of gift cards are never redeemed — a boon to the retailers selling them, for sure, but not so much to anyone else. It is, to paraphrase a favourite Tom Waits lyric, like throwing money off the back of a train. Gift cards collecting dust in wallets, office desks and kitchen cupboards only lose their value to inflation — or worse, if the company selling them goes out of business. Witness the worthless 20-year-old Blockbuster gift cards currently for sale on eBay for a fraction of their original face value (plus shipping). They’re barely valuable as collectors’ items.

So use ‘em if you got ‘em, or at least give them to someone who will — a food bank or shelter, for example, or any organization that serves the community. We’re throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars each year, when we could be improving people’s lives instead.