For you young’ns, gift certificates were just like gift cards, only clunkier. Stores issued them before everything from buying bananas to offshore banking could be accomplished with a quick swipe of a tiny piece of plastic. Maybe that’s why the hipster clerk in the garden store reacted to my gift certificate like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. He’d probably never seen one before.
Least of all one issued NINE years earlier.
“Whoa, didja just come out of a coma or something?” he sputtered.
Nope. Just waiting for something good enough to come along to spend it on.
To wit: one expensive plant stand, which I essentially got for free. Good thing, too, because June was right around the corner and I had a graduation, two showers, and three retirements/“I got such a better job than you suckers”-type celebrations to attend. Plus, there was one friend’s rather delicate medical procedure about which the less said the better (hint: it rhymes with “schmoze job”), although it still called for presents. Everything in June always calls for presents.
Again, that’s where gift cards come in. The Cheapskate Code of Ethics says that if
you receive a card as a gift, you can’t turn around and use it to buy a present for somebody else—no re-gift carding allowed, as it were. But it says nothing about not using the resultant savings to purchase baubles for others.
Let me put it another way: $100 not spent on a plant stand buys a lovely graduation pen or some really nice earrings for someone transitioning to a new, uh, “schmoze” (Hey, who even knew she had ears with that giant honker?!)
Some people actually pooh-pooh gift cards, saying they’re completely impersonal and soulless. Uh-huh. They’ll seriously change their tune when I waltz into their wedding with that combination rotisserie oven/vacuum cleaner they so desperately wanted and which I could afford once I stopped buying food for a couple of weeks.
Don’t worry. I’m not starving myself. Not while there’s an Entenmann’s coffee cake left in the world and people willing to lavish me with supermarket gift cards.
