Deals
Gift Cards: Show Me the Money!
This holiday season, I’ve noticed an emerging trend in the uber popular gift card arena… incentives!
Typically, when buying a gift card for someone, I have to pay the face value of the gift I want to give. Now, I’m seeing companies start to offer some pretty good incentives to buy them. Knowing this, you could stretch your dollar even further by taking advantage of the various promotions out there, and cash in on the freebies.
Some of the offers I’ve seen lately include:
- Great Clips: Free haircut (~$20) when you buy a $100 gift card, a 20% return.
- Subway: Free six inch sandwich (~$5) when you buy a $25 gift card, a 20% return.
- Triple O’s: Free original burger (~$4) when you buy $20 in gift cards, a 20% return.
- Extreme Pita: Free $5 when you buy $20 in gift cards, a 25% return.
- Boston Pizza: Free pizza or pasta (~$10) when you buy $50 in gift cards, a 20% return.
These offers are pretty good, seeing as you get 20%+ more if you took advantage of any of them. Regardless of who they’re for (even yourself) you would earn above and beyond the face value of the gift card in cash or freebies — and who doesn’t love freebies?
The only draw back to this, however, is the reality that not all gift cards get used up. Even with the best intentions to use them in full, cards can get misplaced, plans can change, and in some cases, the balance can start to diminish automatically over time. As well, some of the freebies have heavy restrictions around them, making them even harder to take advantage of. So, giving a particular company money in advance for their services, could be a hard pill to swallow.
But, for things you know you’ll use up — like a Subway gift card — this could be a very rewarding incentive.
Next year, I’ll keep a better eye out for these gift card incentives when shopping — they could just sway my purchasing decision from one company to another, either for myself, or for someone else. My guess is, this trend will ramp up over the next few years, as companies realize the impact it can have on a consumer.
Boxing Day: Sale or Not-So-Sale?
With Christmas done and over with, its time to turn our attention to something new… Boxing Day!
While there has been a notable decline in the quality of “door crashers” over the years, along with any sense of urgency to “act now” (seeing as the ‘day’ is now a ‘week’, heading into a ‘month’), it still does make for a good day to buy some high value items.
Now, I’m not stupid enough one to to freeze my butt off waiting in line to save $100, but I am willing to wait online to buy, and did just that this morning.
I’ve been debating replacing my old TV (about 8 years old now) and upgrading to a big LCD one for quite some time. I’ve been holding off, simply because I didn’t think the new TV’s were worth their price. Before, they were around $800+, but for the online Boxing Day Sale, I was able to get a nice big 42″ LCD TV for just $599…. what they claim to be $200 off.
I’m typically a cynic when it comes to sales as the major chains always seems to have very similar offers and prices, almost every other week. So when these ‘sales’ pop up, they’re really not a big deal — merely reflect the actual price of the product.
To make sure this was an actual sale, I quickly shopped online with other electronic retailers, and realized the actual hard savings I would get is around $100 off (not the $200 as advertised), since the same TV at Costco is $699. So by buying on Boxing Day, I actually did save money… $100 to be exact.
I think I’m going to stop while I’m ahead here, as most of the other sale items out there simply don’t interest me or hardly have any actual savings. Not to mention, everything good is already sold out! (and uh, my lack of willingness to stand in the freezing cold for hours)
A purchase like this has been on my radar for the last few years, but never actually in my budget — this one, I’ll slip into my 2010 spending and can easily pay for with part of my slush fund savings account.