Thank you Glorious Leader!
Chocolate glaze donut, Best donut!
Giftcards:
Gift Cards have a major drawback for companies: Although they practically guarentee a sale, the money is locked until actually spent on something.
Say for instance you get a $50 gift card and spend $48.50. There is still a little $ locked away there doing nothing which the company cannot claim for themselves, as it resides in the gift card and has to be ready to be redeemed as and when it is spent... but the customer can't use it until they either find something for $1.50 or redeem it as partial credit on a future purchase - at which point they have probably forgotten about it (I found $3.75 on my amazon account recently marked as gift-card funds and can't even remember the last time I got an Amazon gift card.) The company has the cash, yeah, but they just cannot use it until its actually spent. It's likely the reason gift cards have expiry dates, or companies would just be sat there on a hill of pennies until judgment day.
I am not sure if CIG has the same issue, do gift cards turn into Store Credits for you to use independently or is it actually redeemed from the card voucher/voucher code?
If it turns into store credit, I would argue it is not actually a gift card, as there is no separation between "Store credit" (as you may get from any store in the event of, for instance, a complaint or a return of a product) and the independent gift card funds which are the card purchasers money set aside to be spent by the eventual holder of that gift card.
If someone sent me $25 in a gift card for my birthday (a couple of days ago), there is $25 of fresh money locked in that card until it expires or I spend it.