@unspentapp: Gift cards started as paper, and paper was the problem — gift certificates and store scrip go back to the department-store era, but anything printed on paper is an invitation to anyone with a photocopier. That’s largely why plastic showed up in 1994, when Blockbuster adopted magnetic-stripe cards partly to kill counterfeiting (Neiman Marcus has a competing claim from the same moment). Starbucks turned it into something bigger in 2001 by making the card a stored-value payments rail and, eventually, a loyalty program. Behind the scenes, companies like InComm and Blackhawk built the distribution layer — that spinning rack of a hundred brands at the grocery checkout is its own industry. Then came the ugly years: cards expired, dormancy fees quietly ate balances a few dollars a month, and retailers booked the leftovers as margin. Congress folded gift card rules into the CARD Act in 2009 — five-year minimum before expiration, limits on inactivity fees — while state unclaimed-property laws picked at the rest. The format kept evolving after that: barcode, e-gift, a link in your texts, a pass in Apple Wallet. But the core thing never got fixed. Billions a year still sit in a drawer, in an email from 2022, in a jacket pocket — functionally donated back to the retailer. Thirty years of innovation on the issuing side, almost none on the remembering-you-have-it side.

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2026-08-17 23:29:39

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