Got gift cards collecting dust? Now's the time to use them

The gift cards are stacking up for Neil Cooper. After a count, he says he has 19 cards kicking around his home. 

"I have no idea how much are on any of these," said Cooper, whose collection of gift cards ranges from The Keg to Canadian Tire. 

"We don't really go out that much. Now, maybe my wife will be upset about that because we could go out more. But we haven't been a couple that's gone out for dinner a lot."

Cooper is a busy pediatrician in Calgary who receives gift cards as presents for Christmas or for doing talks related to his work. 

And he isn't the only one with a collection of unused gift cards.

Square, a financial technology company that sells mobile payment devices, found Canadians are sitting on more than $33 million worth of unspent gift cards through its platform alone. 

And as inflation rises and wears down people's wallets, those gift cards are becoming less and less valuable. Of that money tracked by Square, $20 million is on physical gift cards, while the other $13 million is on digital gift cards.

Cooper used to store his cards in a filing cabinet to keep them organized. But he found he wasn't thinking to use them. 

So he moved them to his car's glove compartment, but many still go unused. He's even taken it a step further for his gift cards to Tim Hortons. 

"I've taken all the Tim Hortons cards out of the glove compartment and put them with the Tims rewards card with a paperclip on my dash so that it's there," said Cooper. 

Wendy Cogan-Toyoda, who works with Square, says the company collected data about gift card use from hundreds of thousands of businesses, including retailers, restaurants and other services. 

"Customers do forget that they have these gift cards lying around. The physical ones and the digital ones. And it's real money that they're leaving on the table," said Cogan-Toyoda. 

Toyoda said that during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a spike in digital gift card purchases to support businesses while they were closed. She says those gift card sales went up by 233 per cent in March of 2020, compared to the year before. 

"They were held onto [by] the customers to use for themselves at a later time when the business hopefully reopened. And while many of the businesses have reopened, we still see a high number of sellers with unredeemed gift card balances."