Christmas has just got better. Every Christmas and New Year, millions of people across the country get gift cards and many of those gift cards don’t get used eventually. It is estimated that more than one billion dollars worth of gift cards would go wasted this year. That is millions of gift cards and a lot of money. It is the consumers that stand to lose in such an event. Those who buy the gift cards that go waste are simply spending their money in futility. Those who don’t manage to use their gift cards are contributing to that futility and are not even getting their due gift, as expected or otherwise. The only people profiting from such a gigantic waste are the owners of the companies and the shareholders of the gift card issuers.
Fortunately, this year things would be different. Wal-Mart gift card exchange program changes things. You don’t have to hold onto your gift card that you wouldn’t possibly use, ever. There are numerous gift cards that people don’t like getting but they land up with them and they don’t see themselves using those cards. With the Wal-Mart gift card exchange program, you can have a Wal-Mart gift card in place of your existing gift card and you can stand to get as much as 97% of the value of the gift card you have. The Wal-Mart gift cards can be used online or offline and they would not expire. Considering the reality that Wal-Mart gift card is the most popular, the exchange program makes sense.
Is the Wal-Mart gift card exchange program a masterstroke? It certainly is. Wal-Mart manages to come up with a program that would have millions of people hitting their site or visiting their stores. The company stands to make millions of dollars worth of additional revenue which would otherwise be either sitting in the banks of the issuers of unused gift cards or would have been diverted to those companies whose items people would have bought from other retailers. Wal-Mart manages to be at the centre of attention this holiday season and it puts up a very simple process for card exchanges which will propel many to actually make use of the program.
Given the attention the program is getting in press and media, the Wal-Mart gift card exchange initiative may be poised for a grand success.
