The proof is that there are more than a few businesses which offer gift cards with no expiration dates. Staples is one and, as such, I buy and gift their cards without reservation.
I stand by my statement that businesses with expiring gift cards are greedy-- they are getting something of value up front and then taking it away in what may or may not be a reasonable time frame.
Yeah, in the list of irritations, this type of greed ranks well behind the government thinking they own it, but it is greed nevertheless. By engaging in this type of greedy activity, businesses condone and invite government intervention and, therefore, a "solution" which is worse than the problem. Businesses who have their workers labor under unsafe conditions, do not deliver a fair day's pay for a fair day's work and concentrate on what they can legally get away with rather than what's morally right do likewise.
Conservatives need to be equally loud in advocating ethical behavior among businesses as they do among governments. Winking at, nodding at and excusing unethical business behavior empowers liberals to apply their phony solutions with the iron fist of government which, coincidentally, always result in problems worse than what they set out to cure. I'm reasonably sure that the gentleman who's birthday we celebrate today would agree.
It's not an account receivable, it's an account payable, the store owes somebody (although they probably don't know who) merchandise in exchange for pre-spent money.
Each account is small and simple, the problem is how they stack up, let's say 25% of all gift cards are never redeemed, and you own a store and your store sells 100 every year. At the end of 10 years you have 250 of these accounts, sitting on your computer, taking up space. And the outstanding liability those accounts represents is stacking up top, if you're averaging $50 a certificate you owe $12,500 worth of merch, to random people you don't know who they are. That's going to look pretty bad on the old P&L statement. And that's just one store selling a mere 100 cards a year, escalate that up to WalMart level and you see something that can cause a major accounting headache.
Just because some businesses choose to suffer the headache doesn't mean it's not a headache. It just means they've decided the good PR and customer satisfaction they get from their suffering is worth the headache, their business, their call to make. But the vast majority of businesses that do gift cards don't want the headache.
The shortest timeframe I've seen is Borders which after two years of total non-use loses a couple bucks a month until it eventually zeroes out. Perfectly reasonable, anybody who hasn't used the card at all in two years won't, they probably don't even have it anymore. There's nothing greedy about wanting clean books, and using perjoratives like that just shows you don't want to understand what life is like on the other side of the counter.
There's nothing unethical about this behavior. It's perfectly reasonable to not want to carry millions of dollars in unresolvable liability. It's not like they expire them in 30 days, it's 2 to 5 YEARS before the businesses even start the process of expiring the card. If you can't manage to spend fifty free bucks at Borders in two years, why should they incur the bookkeeping expense waiting for you to finally walk through the door? It's obvious you won't, and they have better things to do with their harddrive space and accountants time than wait for you to suddenly say "woh I've got a Borders card from the Clinton adminitration, I better go spend it".