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The Gift Of Abstraction: The History of the Gift Card
Pondering why the electronic gift card, which is newer than you think, took over the retail industry so quickly. Who had it first, anyway?
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
You ever run into a situation where you return something to a store, and the only option that you have available to you is to receive the balance as a gift card?
Certainly, this is a frustrating state of affairs, especially if it’s a store you don’t particularly like. Despite that, the gift card — a retail phenomenon that came out of nowhere slightly more than two decades ago to redefine our relationship with gifts — has become a hugely popular industry.
Read on for the history of the gift card. Let’s put an extra layer between us and our money.
$46B
The amount that U.S. adults spent on gift cards in 2016, according to the research firm Packaged Facts. The firm notes that while $28 billion of the reported total was spent on gift cards they gave to others, another $11 billion was spent on themselves, while $7 billion came from their employers.
The roots of the modern gift card start with the weaknesses of the gift certificate
For all the advantages of a modern gift card, odds are you’re not going to stick one on a fridge.
The fridge was often the domain of the gift certificate, the paper coupon that was worth its weight in cash at one specific store.
It was a phenomenon that gained steam over time. And while McDonald’s wasn’t first to the trend of single-brand funny money, which dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, the company’s use of prepaid gift certificates helped to set a broader stage for the retail industry as a whole.
