If you’re last-minute shopping today, remember gift-vouchers really are the last resort of the imaginatively challenged. However seriously stuck for ideas you are, just don’t kid yourself your teenage niece would like a Homebase voucher. According to research, £3 billion gets spent every year on vouchers in the UK. And 15% of them never get redeemed. That’s a whopping….well, a whopping amount (it’s too early for maths). It seems that some gift-vouchers are for life and not just for Christmas, as they get left in drawers to collect fluff and silently drift by their expiry date. Others get resold on internet auction sites for less than their face value. If my kids received gift tokens when they were younger, I’d always end up buying them off them. But I didn’t have the heart to negotiate a 15% discount.
Happy Christmas.