An article on the BBC news site caught my eye. Essentially, Which? have estimated consumers lost £100m during lockdown because of shop 'vouchers' that exceeded their time limit during lockdown. Some retailers automatically extended that time limit but apparently, some didn't.
It caught my eye because I haven't seen a 'shopping voucher' in about 50 years. I didn't even realise they still existed.
And frankly, from the point of view of the person given them, I utterly fail to see the advantage. I mean, even if they weren't time limited, they bind the recipient to one or a limited set of shops, to the specific product ranges of those shops, and maybe even worse, to their prices and/or customer service which may well be sub-optimal. Even as a child 50+ years ago, I worked out that cash was far more useful than restrictive vouchers.
So unless deliberately locking someone in to a specific shop or product range is the reason for giving a voucher, why do it?
Does anyone buy these to give? In which case, I'm curious as to the reason. Or does anyone get given them, and if so, what do you think of them, versus cash?
Admittedly, neither shops nor buyers would have predicted the problems CV19 would cause with shop closures and voucher time limits, but even without that, why use them in the First place?
Note: I guess adults giving, for example, cclothes shop vouchers to kids might force them to buy clothes, not booze, drugs, videogames or whatever 'vice' they might have. So, maybe, fair enough.
Note 2: There are no kids in my present-giving circle and haven't been for a while. Among uss adults, we gave up giving presents years ago, having all been on the receiving end of naff choice in socks, or Aunt Maud's home-knitted nightmare jumper preferences, and realised that everybody giving everybody else a similar amount of cash just kept that cash flowing back and forth, pointlessly. Besides, anything we might realistically buy each other that would actually be wanted, we'd all have already bought for ourselves, so if we didn't have it, it's probably because we didn't want it.


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