Marc's Musings

There is only one type of gift certificate/card/coupon that I must confess to really liking. That’s an Amazon.com gift certificate. You can apply it against your account, see the balance and then use it for any purchase from Amazon or any of their affiliates. For me, this is a good thing because I’m always buying stuff from Amazon.

Otherwise, I cannot think of a more terrible idea than taking good, honest money and exchanging it for something that is more limited. Gift certificates are typically good in only one brand of store, can expire, are often forgotten about and frequently obligate the user to spend their own money in an effort to use the complete value of the certificate. Store brand gift cards are in the same boat.

The newer “Visa” gift cards (I presume MasterCard, AMEX and the rest have similar deals) are supposedly as versatile as a regular Visa card but they aren’t. I have a $60 Visa gift card that I received as part of a promotion for switching my natural gas provider.

My first attempt to use it was in a gas pump. That failed miserably since it’s not a real Visa card and there isn’t any PIN associated with it to allow you to use it like a debit card.

I then was able to successfully use it to purchase lunch one day. So I stuck with restaurants as they seem to know how to cajole the cash out of them.

Keeping my receipts so that I’d know how much was left on the card I went for lunch one day and tried to use the remaining balance on the card and found it was declined (not a great hardship as I was already going to have to pay for about 1/2 the meal cash anyway). The waiter was pretty good about it, he tried several different amounts on my behalf knowing that I was just trying to drain the card but to no avail.

Just now I checked the card balance and last 5 transactions and find there’s a charge on the card that brings the balance down to about 87 cents. I can tell you that I’m not about to bother trying to use the card to claim 87 cents! I’m also a little dismayed that I can’t pinpoint that extra charge. It was only for $8.40 and I have some other receipts that I want to go through, but the novelty of the card is such that I’m pretty sure I remember every time I used it (3 times)…

Anyway, that’s where I’m back to my Amazon gift certificate or just cash (giving or receiving).  As I think about it, I suppose for other folks who shop at a particular store a lot maybe it’s like Amazon is for me. They’ll use the value of the card in a couple of weeks and be the happier for it.

But I suggest that, for the vast majority of cards and certificates, they will be lost, forgotten, expired or otherwise unusable benefiting only the retailer and not your intended gift recipient.

Clark Howard was also warning that some of the gift card suppliers actually charge you to let you know your remaining card balance.

Now this is an idea I can get behind. This school in Burleson, Texas is actually teaching both the faculty and students to take action in a variety of situations.

My favorite, if a gunman comes into the room, rather than cower and wait for them to decide your fate, they are being trained to throw anything they can get their hands on at the gunman and to rush him.

There is some controversy about this approach, but I’ll leave that to the proponents of left and right ideals to argue. For myself I believe that the folks in the situation are best off taking control away from the bad guy. And if they are all encouraged that this is the best approach I believe the chance for a successful outcome is much greater than if one or two people try to go it alone.

I have to wonder what the long term impact is on a hostage victim after having acquiesced to a gunman’s demands and having had to just sit there and wait for their fate to be decided for them. Some may argue that “at least they’re alive”, but that is just for the lucky ones who weren’t butchered. Both in Columbine and in plenty of other incidents, many of those who handed over their fates to obviously hostile people paid for that acquiescence dearly.

I think everybody who travels has their own story about the arbitrary and laughable measures implemented by the TSA as it tries to show that it’s “doing something” to keep us all safe. Here is a Boing Boing article that purports to show how completely implausible the “liquid explosive threat” really is.

The more we de-emphasize science in schools and ignore scientific achievements in our society, the more we’re going to get policies and decisions based on fear, superstition, pseudo-science and myth. It’s the twenty-first century, surely we can shuck some of our most primitive instincts and stop cowering in the dark, fearful of being smitten by magic means.

We have a congress filled with lawyers, Political Science and History Majors (all of which are necessary to some degree) but virtually no science majors, it’s no wonder they can be swayed toward creating hysterical legislation.