Discounted gift cards can be used to buy everything from groceries to clothing … to doggie treats!
The adult female in the house (aka my wife) left this weekend for an emotional and spiritual recharge in the Shenandoahs at a friend's house. Which means I got the weekend with my daughter, who's currently growing up a lot faster than I'd like.
Discounted gift cards are a good teachable money moment
One of our activities this past Saturday was to head to the nearby shopping center. One of the stores in there is a Petco. They have a doggie treat bar where you can pick up goodies by the pound. She enjoys giving our two beagle mixes treats, and she has been paying for the treats herself from her allowance.
On a hunch I went over to Gift Card Granny and searched for discounted gift cards to Petco. Gift Card Zen had a number of printable discounted cards for Petco – at a nice 24% discount!
My daughter gladly took me up on this. She gave me $13.42 from her spending jar in exchange for a $17.66 Petco gift card, which I received immediately via email from Gift Card Zen after buying it with my credit card. (I'll be keeping the 1% cash back rewards on my Chase Sapphire Visa, thankyouverymuch. 🙂 )
Discounted gift cards and kids
So with printed discounted gift card in hand, we went to Petco and got the doggie treats. Paying with the printable card worked just peachy fine and the gentleman at the cash register even wrote the remaining balance on the sheet of paper after she had paid.
I'd like to call out a few points:
- Treat the card, or the piece of paper, like cash. As I handed the printout to my daughter, I told her to make sure that she kept track of this. I told her that someone else could just walk in with the piece of paper and buy stuff. She got the point, but there's not always a clear connection between gift cards and money (or credit cards and money, for that matter!)
- Don't get wide eyes over the balance on the card. It pleased me that my daughter didn't spend any more than she had planned to spend, even though she could have. Even though I got the smallest balance card I could, it still was more than she would have needed for the one trip. Nonetheless, she measured out (with extreme care) one pound of treats from the bar, and that was all she got. This is another take on treating the card like cash: Pretend that you're paying with cash and the transaction is a bit more real.
- Use the card in a reasonable period of time. Gift Card Zen guarantees their cards for a year, which is nice. It's still a good idea not to let the card hang around too long. This increases the chance that it could be misplaced, forgotten about, accidentally thrown away, etc. The Petco card we got should be used up in a couple of months, which is acceptable.
- Integral part of an allowance? It occurred to me that discounted gift cards are much like prepaid debit cards, but for a single store. While we could do this exclusively (or partially) for her allowance, it seems better to let her make the choice with real money.
Do you use discounted gift cards? Do you use them with your children?
