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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

I like gift cards as long as it's for a store that I would normally shop at anyways.

But a few years ago, I was given a gift card to Macy's. I don't shop at Macy's and had a hard time finding something to get. Every single thing I looked at, I could get at half the price basically anywhere else. I ended up buying some kitchen stuff, but felt like the giver's money was wasted.

The worst gift card in my experience is a Visa/MC/AmEx gift card. It is often a pain to deal with them if the balance on the card isn't enough to cover a purchase unless the business you're spending it at is capable to splitting a purchase over multiple credit cards and the cashier knows how to do that.

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I use the Visa gift cards for charitable contributions. The nice thing about charities, as opposed to random purchases, is you get to pick the amount.

Oh that's a good idea.

Best way to handle that is at the grocery store. Due to the prevalence of EBT cards, all cashiers are going to know how to process multiple cards.

Usually, but not necessarily.

Back when I worked at a grocery store, if a customer paid with EBT, we just pressed the EBT button and the register would charge only the food total to the card and then ask for more money. If they paid with a credit card, we just pressed the credit card button and then swiped the card and the balance of the transaction would get charged.

What a lot of my fellow cashiers didn't know, because they were never explicitly told during training, is that they could specify the amount to charge to the credit card by typing the amount and then pressing the credit card button.

If a customer had a $20 Visa Gift card, but had a $30 purchase, and they tried to pay with the gift card, but the cashier only pressed the CC button without specifying to only charge $20, then the card would simply get declined with no message about how much was remaining on the card. And due to lack of training, even if the customer knew how much was on the card, the cashier might not know how to only charge the $20.

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