If I ever win the lottery, forget handing me one of those oversized checks popular when a giver wants the transfer of money to be done in the most high-profile of ways.
You’ve seen them, checks so big there’s no wallet huge enough to fold them up and place them into. Just keep them in your giant checkbook in your giant glove compartment. (By the way, has anyone ever actually kept gloves in those compartments?)
No, just give me the cold, hard cash. But I’ve never been a fan of cash as a Christmas or birthday gift.
Oddly, perhaps, I have never once been bothered by someone handing me cash. Not once. And if you don’t believe me, I dare you to try it. Just hand me a C-note and see if it bothers me at all. To really test the theory, hand me two.
But the giving of cash as a gift has always ruffled my feathers. Giving cash seemed a little too, well, transactional to be part of a celebratory event. What about spending time finding the perfect gift for someone?
My wife’s family at times gives great gifts, and at others is content to hand over a nice card with some moolah tucked inside. Once upon a time the cash might have bothered me. Can’t it be too impersonal?
Well, that’s what I used to think.
I realized cash was always just the right size and came in the right color. It has never required an accompanying exchange of receipt that would empower the recipient to take the gift back to a store, wait in line at “customer service” and eventually emerge with store credit.
Still, for some, it can feel tacky to hand over some dough as a gift. So some shoppers go out and, struggling to find that perfect present, opt for a gift card.
The gift card industry is huge. If you doubt it, take a look next time you’re inside a retail store and you’ll probably find a huge rack of plastic cards of every possible design that can be “charged up” with almost any amount of money the buyer wants.
CEB, a technology and “best practice insight” company, estimates spending on gift cards will reach a record $130 billion this year.
The concept of the gift card is even more foreign to me than giving cash once was, and they’ve pushed me over into the pro-cash camp. What’s the point of a gift card?
This is how it works: A shopper goes out to find a gift but gets stumped, so why not just get a gift card? Except for the generic cards (like Visa or MasterCard) for which one pays for the privilege of using them, store gift cards lock the recipient into shopping at a particular store. If it’s for Starbucks, it’s for coffee. If it’s at Lowe’s or Home Depot, it’s for home improvement materials.
Why is it viewed as desirable to convert cash into a plastic card that paints the recipient into a corner? Give them a $50 gift card to Walmart and they’re stuck spending it there. Give them $50 in cash and they can spend it anywhere, even two or three different places.
People also lose gift cards or toss them without realizing there’s still some value on them. That’s great profit for the company that issued the gift card.
Companies are smart, though. Some of them let customers order custom gift cards, with their child’s face or a family portrait beaming from the hard plastic. It’s the gift that keeps on swiping.
As they say, the form of the gift isn’t as important as the sentiment behind it, but this gift card business has made me a cash convert. Rather than trouble with some store’s plastic card, doesn’t it make more sense just to dole out the cash? Last I checked, cash works everywhere.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge’s office last week issued a consumer warning about gift cards, urging customers to read the fine print, be aware of fees and keep receipts. Urge the recipient to use the card as soon as possible, Rutledge’s office suggests, to avoid misplacing or forgetting about it.
Or keep it simple: Give cash. Maybe some will see it as crass, as I once did. Certainly, a well-considered gift can warm the heart, but I’ve yet to see anyone disappointed by receiving some dead presidents.
The only people this theory falls short for are boyfriends and husbands. In their situations, putting some thought into a gift is pretty much a necessity, at least if they want to stay boyfriends and husbands.
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Greg Harton is editorial page editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Contact him by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWAGreg.