The Gift Card Minefield: How to Get Your Money’s Worth (Mint.com Infographic)
If you haven’t seen it already, check out Mint.com’s great infographic exploring the gift card industry (The Gift Card Minefield: How to Get Your Money’s Worth).
As you’ll see below, the numbers are astounding: The gift card industry totals more than $87 billion a year, but we at Plastic Jungle estimate that $30 billion of those gift cards go unredeemed. With such a valuable asset, it’s a shame not everyone is getting their money’s worth.
The good news is that there’s an easy solution. With the use of Plastic Jungle, you can sell gift cards you aren’t planning to use. So before you forget about those gift cards lying around your house, and instead of navigating their complex rules and fees, check out Plastic Jungle and start thinking of gift cards as cash!
Budget Planner Software – Mint.com
It sounds like you are saying that $30 billion of the $87 billion spent on gift cards every year goes unspent. Is that what you really mean? Most conventional estimates pin the amount of breakage yearly at around 10% or $8.7 billion per year.
Perhaps you meant $30 billion in cumulative unspent gift cards from the current and previous years, which sounds like a very good number to me.
You’re correct, Peter… $30 billion in cumulative unredeemed gift cards out there (from this year and past years).
Can you imagine what would happen if we were able to put that untapped resource back to use for both consumes and retailers?! Pretty powerful!