Look Gift Cards in the Mouth!

OK, Albertans, it's time to rise up and use the law to prevent companies from making oodles from the fact that about 10% of gift cards are never used, or are used long after they're given.

You see, it used to be that stores that sold gift cards imposed artificial deadlines after which the card was no longer valid...a year or 2 years was common. They also imposed extra 'carrying' fees, $2 a month after a year, for example, until the balance was zero.

I recently had the same thing happen to me. I took three cards that I had forgotten about and tried to redeem them at Totem and Sears. As well, I tried to use a Capital One VISA gift card at a retail outlet.

In the end, I scored 0 for 3. The VISA card was no longer valid (no time limit was listed on the card). The Totem and Sears cards were, I was told by store employees, outdated.

Steaming mad, I checked the Alberta Fair Trading Act and found that a distant memory was indeed correct. These gift card practices are illegal in Alberta, and stores that practice them can be fined up to $100,000 for doing so.

I'm on my way back to Sears and Totem to flash the Alberta Gift Card Regulation fact sheet at the store managers and see how fast they say sorry. If they don't, I'm going straight to the provincial consumer affairs people to swear out complaints.

One glitch for may will occur if the stores' records show the cards were purchased before November 1, 2008, when the legislation came into effect. I'm pretty sure my cards didn't sit around that long, so I'm hopeful.

FYI, I have no legal grounds for complaint re the VISA card, because the provincial gift card regulations do not apply to financial institutions.

And BTW, the movie theatre companies (Cineplex comes directly to mind) have figured out a way around this legislation. The adult admission certificates you buy for discounted prices at the AMA, for example, have time limits on them (about a year, I think). If you try to use them after a year, they'll be rejected.

The loophole for the theatres is that under Alberta law, if the gift card (or certificate) is for a specific service rather than for a specific dollar value, the certificate does not fall under the Gift Card Regulations. So beware. It's still a scam, but you can't do anything about it. They're got your money, and that of everyone else who's not used a certificate in time...and they've got it forever!

Even Consumer Reports does it!

If you're a magazine subscriber of a certain age, it's likely that you can never really remember when you renewed your subscription. So when the magazines send you a series of zappy, insistent, 60% OFF IF YOU ACT NOW!!! letters, at some point you panic and send them their damn money.

Well, it's a real scam. And even Consumer Reports does it.

Consumer Reports will mail you these re-subscription letters repeatedly even if your subscription isn't due for renewal for a full year or more. I've even received my Consumer Reports wrapped in one of those "Don't let this be your last issue!" covers when I had 12 months left to run on my paid subscription.

The scam is that they collect your money a year early, bank it and receive interest until the time REALLY comes for you to renew. For one subscriber, that interest doesn't amount to much. But if you've scammed 400,000 readers for $40 each, that's $16,000,000 sitting in THEIR bank account collecting 90-day T-Bill interest.

Even these days, with those rates around 1%, that's $160,000 that they're collecting. When interest rates return to sane levels, it could run $1 million or more a year.

So if this scam wrankles you and you want to do something about it, here's my suggestion...

Use the magazines' web sites to check the status of your subscriptions, and when you get VERY premature re-subscription notices, simply mail them back to the magazine, in their postage-paid envelopes, only mail them empty.

Believe me, doping this will give you a devilish kind of pleasure!