Notaphily (pronounced no-TAH-fuh-lee) is the collecting of bank notes. Related terms are philately (stamp collecting) and scripophily (old stock and bond collecting).
After writing my post yesterday on gift cards vs. cash, and after thinking about what people might do if their unused gift cards expire worthless or if the company can go out of business, I checked on eBay to see if people were selling expired Circuit City gift cards.
There were a few auctions going on for Circuit City cards. After that, I looked around and found that there's an active community of people who collect gift cards. I'll call it plastiphily (plass-TIFF-uh-lee). Take, for example, this site: GiftCardCollector.com. This is a passion every bit as powerful as coin collecting or baseball card collecting. There's discussion over things like the following:
- differences in design of a single card over different years
- printing registration variations
- whether specific geographic area designations appear on the card or not
- foreign-language versions
- die-cut cards
(Oh, these were discussed just about Macy's gift cards!)
EBay has auctions going on for no-value gift cards right now. The two auctions that have bids right now are a 2004 $25 Starbucks gift card from Canada, and a lot of 25 Victoria's Secret gift cards (currently $3.99 + $3.50 shipping).
A by-product of this individual fascination with gift cards is a comprehensive history of a retail advertising niche. It's not just “Here's a gift card for that hard-to-buy-for person.” It's also “Here's a gift card with a terrified cat on it for that hard-to-buy-for person who enjoys terrifying cats.” It's store credit, with your choice of this season's designer colors.
The first credit card was issued in 1951 but I don't know how far back gift cards go. If you know, I'd love to hear.
What's more, if you find that you're stuck with a worthless card, you may be able to sell it anyway! Or start a new hobby. A great chance to make some lemonade out of gift card lemons.
Hah! Sounds like me, only with old credit and debit cards. I started collecting them for a future art project, but now I like seeing them scattered in a box…maybe it makes me feel rich?
At first I found it surprising that people would actually collect these cards.
Then I recalled seeing Neil Patrick Harris in an interview where he admitted collecting airline barf bags! There is a collector for anything.
Go figure?