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Gift cards are a great gift as long as you normally shop at that store.  If I was given a $50.00 gift card to LOWES, I would probably go and try and find something around the $50.00 range.  Most of the time if your poor like me, you wont spend extra money to use the total amount of the card.  What happens to that money they charged for the gift card? 

First the money is placed in the bank, now they are making money on that money sold as a gift card.  Let’s just say a popular company sells 1 million gift cards over the holiday season, this is probably severely understated but to get my point across I’m using this number.  I have several gift cards with at least $1.50 left on them.  What happens to the extra, the money is currently sitting in their bank account making money.  If you take an average of $.99 left on each gift card times the 1 million gift cards sold.  You would still have $990,000 dollars left in your account.  That’s quite a bit of money. 

Here is what I suggest to do, use your gift cards for a slightly higher priced item and pay the difference.  This way you aren’t contributing to the $990,000 dollars.