Baffled by this one. I used to work somewhere where gift vouchers had printed on them very clearly, that they couldn't be used after expiry, and no change would be given. But people wanted to use them after expiry, and wanted change to be given.
Why is your failure to book something in good time, the fault of the retailer?
The fault is in the retailer having the audacity to put an expiry date on there in the first place. You’ve (or the giver has) pre-paid – and effectively loaned them your money – and then they just decide they aren’t going to repay it, and will keep it for themselves.
Yes, maybe people will say “they tell you there’s an expiry date” (even though they often don’t clearly spell this out to you – and even if they do, the whole design of their product is that they know the purchaser and user are likely to be different people) – but people are busy and don’t necessarily realise that something that is effectively cash in their pockets will be randomly taken away from them after an arbitrary date. A voucher is basically an IOU – a kind of debt, you could say – and it’s shoddy in the extreme to say that, after as little as 12 months, you’re going to renege on it. Even the Bank of England, when they withdraw notes from general circulation, always have a way for you to get your money back after any length of time.
National Book Tokens don’t seem to have a problem with the concept of a customer pre-paying for their purchases – their cards expire after 8 years (not 1 or 2) – and even after that, you can contact them for a replacement. You’d be far better giving book tokens or even just ‘Bank of England gift vouchers’, but a huge part of the gift card industry is selling the idea that they’re a really thoughtful gift, when all it’s doing is limiting what the recipient can spend their money on and for how long; it’s really a way of them asking you for a loan but dressing it up like they are doing you a favour.
The big shops actually build it into their profit projections, based on the expected proportion of people who will never use the card (or leave some value on it), at whose expense (and often disappointment) they expect to benefit. It’s not enough for them to have already taken in trust a customer’s guarantee that the recipient will spend the money with them and nobody else – or that a card not used for years will already lose the holder some value because of inflation - both already a big advantage for them.
It’s one of those things that most people now just accept as the norm without actually stopping to think about it. Nobody would ever in a million years stoically accept it if a (so-called) friend borrowed money from them, managed to avoid repaying it for a year or two and then simply claimed the loan had ‘expired’ and been written off their balance sheet.