While I love buying presents for my nearest and dearest, I’m not equally enthusiastic about gift-giving when it comes to people whose tastes I’m not particularly familiar with.
The truth is that while receiving something is always lovely, I can’t even count the number of times I have received things I never knew I didn’t want. In turn, this fear of getting it completely wrong has led me down the voucher path several times and while at first, I really thought this was the best method, I’m no longer so confident in my conviction.
Acquiring a voucher is pretty easy cheese: you walk into a shop, smack down anything between €20 and €100 and walk out with the equivalent amount etched onto a piece of cardboard. Many of us don’t even hear what the salesgirl is muttering about time limits and even fewer of us turn the voucher around to see the fine print that even a mouse with a magnifying glass would be hard-pressed to decipher.
The voucher is tossed into an envelope, handed over and more often than not, in six months and a day’s time, the voucher bearer will remember they had money to spend which has, apparently, just expired.
Money doesn’t expire, so why should the voucher I’ve paid for come with a time limit?
To be honest, I find this notion verging beyond the ridiculous. Money doesn’t expire, so why should the voucher I’ve paid for come with a time limit? When the voucher doesn’t get spent, I hardly get a cheque in the post with a refund for goods which haven’t been purchased.
And that’s not even where the buck stops. I remember one particularly sunny occasion where I did remember I had a voucher at home and after proudly handing it over as if it were St Peter’s keys to heaven, I was tartly informed that it could only be used on non-sale items (the entire shop was in the throes of sale season).
Of course, by the time the sale was over, the voucher had expired. Such are the manmade ironies of life. Naturally, there will be those wonderful few who will protest that I should have checked my voucher’s expiry date nightly and then cross-referenced it with the time frame when sales usually happen. To those few, I will send a ‘Get-a-life’ voucher. Not all of us spend our days watching the kettle boil. While some shops graciously renew vouchers or indeed issue them without expiry dates, it appears to be an exception to the rule.
The truth is that not many people appreciate the value of their own money and are too complacent when it’s taken away from them under their very noses, readily surrendering to an often ill-informed salesgirl’s edicts.
Stop feeding into the voucher system that doesn’t value you or your right to spend your money when you want and how you want. It’s a true pity there isn’t a voucher for consumer rights.