We have all seen them, and shops that are dedicated to selling them are poping up. Hell you can walk into a Post Office these days and buy them. Im talking about Gift Cards. The peice of plastic that has replaced the paper Gift Voucher from days of old.
Now why is there a need for a 101 on how to use a gift card? THe answer is simple really. People are stupid.
First off, the cards are empty, they have no money on them when they are hanging up in a store. Would retailers be stupid to have money hanging up around a store? No. I see people stealing these cards all the time, thinking that they are taking "free" money. Fucking idiots.
Story Time.
This fucking bogan lady, who looked fucking bogan, dress in all Holden Gear, including a Holden beanie, was hovering around the gift card stand, looking all shifty. I then see her pocket several giftcards and head into the aisles where she discards the cardboard that the cards are stuck to.
She then does a large shopping. Several DVD's, lots of make-up, all expensive shit. SHe gets to the check out and the shopping comes to over $500. When it comes to pay, she pulls out a giftcard (cause on the back it mentions that it can be stored with up to $500 of credit.) She hands it to the checkout chick to put throught, only to have it "decline". When she was asked as to how much was on the card, she naturally didn't know. With the checkout chick thinking that there was money on it, ran a check. She found out it wasn't activated.
The bogan pulls out another card, it two wasn't activated. The checkout chick went throught this 5 times before asking the bogan if she just picked them up off the shelf thinking they have money on them. When asked this question, the bogan ran out the shop. We spent 2 hours putting the shopping back on the shelf, 2 hours that could have been spent on serving customers.
End of Story.
So as you can tell, that was one example of how I fucking hate these mother fucking giftcards. The other fucking reasons is the way the cunts use them.
Now here is a Gift Card basic. You can use them as many times as you like till either the card expires, or you run out of funds. I would suggest that you squeeze them for as much as you can, even if there is 1 cent remaining.
If 5 people leave 1 cent on their card, then that is 5 cents that are left unclaimed. It all adds up.
Now back to the basic. As a result of the multi use gift card, people are spending as they need, which is good, however, the person serving you does not fucking know how much is remaining on your fucking card. They fucking just don't know.
If your shopping comes to $49.50 and you hand over a $50 gift card, or swipe it yourself (which I recomend), then thats fine. There will not be any errors. But if you fucking think that because there is $30 remaining on your card that you can swipe it without telling the checkout chick that there is fucking $30 on your card, that it will deduct the $30, leaving you with $19.50 that you will pay in cash, then, no. It fucking doesn't work like that.
Gift cards that use the EFTPOS machine are basically EFTPOS cards. They are to be treated the same. You don't swipe your ATM card knowing you have $30 left and thinking that the machine knows. You always tell the checkout chick that you have $30 on your card and you will pay the rest in cash. You with gift cards, you should fucking do the same.
The only time a checkout chick will know the balance of your card, is outside a transaction (like before your things start getting scanned). But in the interest of speeding things up, before you start shopping, if your not sure, either check online, or use the ezybanking booth to check the balance. (Thats one thing that Woolworths doesn't advertise at the booths, is gift card balance enquiries. Get on that.)
The time consuming option is to get the checkout chick to check. As the WOWPOS terminals wont let the cards be swiped yet, they have to manually type in the card number.
So please, fucking know whats on your card before you come shopping, and inform the checkout chick when payment is to be made at the end of the transaction as there is too much pissing about to check.
This ends part one on Gift Cards. Tune in for part 2.
Also, look out for a Ninja cast in the New Year.
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