What used to be an impersonal thoughtless gift, apparently is all the rage now. Gift cards, you can't seem to escape 'em. Here's a few recent items surrounding the gift that keeps on giving:
Unused Gift Cards
Consumer Reports has an interesting article discussing the controversy of unused gift cards. The article even mentions that consumers are currently sitting on roughly $972 million in unused gift cards!
Tuning Out of iTunes
Then there's the recent iTunes craziness. Apparently sooo many iTunes Gift Cards were giving out for Christmas, that Apple's iTunes store just slowed down to a crawl at times, spouted tons of error messages or just kept some users out of the store completely. Guess that's a good problem to have if you're Apple.
Trading Gift Cards
With all those unused gift cards, you'd think there's got to be someone out there with a gift card they don't want for a store that you like, and maybe you've got a gift card for a store you don't like, but someone else does. Well, a number of sites such as Cardavenue and SwapaGift will let you do just that. You can sell your card to the site for a percentage of the card's value, buy cards for less than their face value, or trade your card for one you'd like.
