An email is circulating advising people to be careful when buying gifts cards because many stores are closing.
“Stores that are planning to close after
Christmas are still selling the (gift) cards through the holidays even though
the cards will be worthless January 1. There is no law preventing them
from doing this. On the contrary, it is referred to as ‘Bankrupcy
Planning)”
I always check announcements of this type out through a little web investigation. Here’s today’s crop of research.
- Store closings and bankruptcy filings according to Snopes
- More on bankruptcy filings and how gift cards could be affected, also Snopes
- I found a book on bankruptcy planning for businesses
- Austin comments at this blog
I work for a company that manages and tracks gift cards, and I’ve been following retailers filing for bankruptcy on savvywallet.com. My advice? Go spend your gift cards, you may not know how long they will be accepting them. Don’t forget The Sharper Image incident: $75m in unused gift cards.
- Even AOL weighs in on retail store closings.
I guess I should share the conclusions I arrived at after reviewing this information. I agree with Austin – go out and spend your gift card money while you still can. As presents, it’s better to give cash instead of gift cards. The dollar may devalue but it won’t disappear. As far as the “future of retail”, I would personally ecstatically welcome a renaissance of the neighborhood nurturing small-store downtown shopping area, which I predict will become fuller and more vibrant as mega-retail operations close their giant store locations.
The cost of highway and mall tenancy is exorbitant and is clearly a large part of what keeps the price of goods high in the stores which populate them [sales aside]. I wouldn’t mind seeing the demise of the American mall network begin to take root. Maybe neighborly will begin to grow on us again.