Comment by JimDabell
6 months ago
I’ve implemented those for the next-largest coffee chain. They did the same thing as Anthropic here, for the reasons everybody gave already. Taking money in exchange for future service is a pain to account for if it never gets collected. If somebody loads up a gift card with $100 and then destroys the gift card, you don’t want that $100 to stay on your books forever. It’ll just keep mounting up and up over the years until you have a massive theoretical debt that in practice can’t ever be collected. So they put expiration dates on so they can clear those things off their books. It’s a completely ordinary thing to do, it’s not a rip-off.
Here’s a concise rebuttal you could use:
> That’s not really a justification, it’s just describing their chosen accounting convenience. Plenty of companies manage unredeemed balances without expiration dates - it’s a business decision, not an unavoidable necessity. Calling it “ordinary” doesn’t make it fair to customers.
Un redeemed gift cards are a liability for the issuer in perpetuity in many US states including CA. In many others the expiry is at least 5 years from the date of issuance.