Whipped Cream Difficulties

Gift cards are, gloriously, privately issued bank notes backed by the full faith and credit of Chipotle.

I suspect that, politically, there’s a lot of stuff we’d disagree about. But Patrick McKenzie of Stripe has been writing a lot of smart stuff: both on his Twitter (for example, this thread on buying new glasses, or this one about tax filing) and his newsletter.

The quote above is from a recent issue of his newsletter about “The secondary market in gift cards“. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I didn’t know, or hadn’t thought about:

Consider the corner bodega, for example. If you go there for a routine purchase, ring up $16.29, and then discover that you only have $15, that might mean you have to return some items. But some bodega owners will ask you “OK, if you don’t have money, what do you have?” And if you have e.g. a $20 Fandango movie theatre gift card, the bodega owner might say “Good enough! See you later.”

…

It becomes known that you can text an unbanked relative money by walking into any retailer and buying a gift card in cash, and that they will be able to convert that back into cash in minutes without needing to e.g. show ID that they may not have.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t have another good place to stick this:

pic.twitter.com/UbexmgRIa8

— The deadly river Neva (@pipandbaby) December 23, 2021

I am amused by this because: a while back (it may have been Christmas 2019) a group of Saturday Dining Conspirators got into a discussion of the Hallmark Christmas Movie Cinematic Universe (HCMCU). If any of us had drawing talent (and could get past the copyright issues) we’d start doing HCMCU graphic novels.

Speaking of bad ideas…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2021 at 9:36 am and is filed under Geek, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.