Choose your gift card wisely

£250m per year wasted on unredeemed shop gift cards.

Last week, the BBC’s Money Box programme reported that £250m per year is wasted on unredeemed shop gift cards. Although sales of the cards are worth over £4bn, 6 per cent of their value goes unused, in part because they typically expire after a year.

Speaking on the programme, Andrew Johnson, director general of the UK Gift Card and Voucher Association, said: "For a retailer, a gift card or voucher remains a liability on the books so at some point it makes good financial sense to remove that liability."

But is this really a problem? Surely if you can’t find something in a shop that appeals to you after a year then that gift card clearly wasn’t for you.