Gift cards: why are they good business?
This kind of digressing post is exactly why my productivity can be sub-optimal sometimes. :) Last week, I ended up buying a gift card. For a couple of seconds, the thought crossed my mind, why does a gift card worth $50 cost exactly $50? The convenience of getting a gift card and the flexibility that it gave the recipient was worth something to me and I might be willing to pay a little extra for it. The marginal cost of printing the card (though minimal) did cost the store something, and there was the fixed cost of the infrastructure for the payments. Shouldn't stores then charge more for their gift cards? But then I decided the store could probably charge considerably lesser than $50 for the $50 gift card, but pricing it at $50 still made sense! The best part was the there seem to be so many different reasons for them being able to charge less than the face value of a gift card for it. These were the ones I could come up with right away. Are there any more? Time value of money: ...