I think gift cards are the smartest and dumbest inventions in the last (however many) years. I mean, $75 million dollars... for nothing! Not bad.

Since when was it a bad thing to just give someone MONEY!!!

I'm going to start selling "Gift Money". I will charge $1.10 for every Gift Money Dollar I send you. The value of your Gift Money Dollar is exactly $1.00 and you can use it in any store you would like. Accept, it's called Gift Money Dollar as opposed to that old dollar thing you use on a daily basis.

People are so stupid... I can just see Lewis Black ranting about this...

I think it all started with Disney dollars. You spend real money to buy fake money that can only be spent at Disney World. The kicker was that tourist bought that money and many wouldn't return to Disney for years by which time they'd lost the Disney Dollars.

Other companies realized that Disney was making money hand over fist selling worthless pieces of paper and they wanted in. So came the world of Gift Certificates and later, plastic gift cards. That money goes straight to profit and people lose the cards. Even if you keep the gift card many now have expiration dates and "Maintenance Fees". It costs alot to maintain a plastic card you know. Bankruptcy is where you really get screwed since they are not required to honor your worthless plastic once they decide to shut down. It's such a scam.

Haha.

I had 400 bucks to sharper image. It sucked. I seriously went the day after the bankruptcy date to find out that they no longer accepted it. We need some type of protection against that. Turns out, there is a company, and I quote from marketwire: "Leverage Inc. today announced a new bankruptcy insurance policy that allows customers holding gift cards purchased via its LeverageCard.com destination from Sharper Image and other merchants filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to transfer remaining, unredeemable balances to gift cards from other retailers available on the Leverage site."