Ceri JC

It's a societal thing. For some insane reason, in polite society it's considered vulgar to give cash, it's considered vulgar to give a gift with the price label still on it, yet it's completely fine to give a gift voucher with the value emblazoned on the front in inch high letters.

I suppose vouchers can serve some limited purpose; I received a couple hundred pounds of Halfords vouchers from my insurers after my garage was broken into and the noticed on my inventory that 90% of it was Halfords Professional stuff. It made sense then; less P&P for them than shipping me the tools and a "better than nothing" fraud prevention measure.

Mind you, the inherent overhead of the scheme (all currencies have a built in cost in things like minting coins, fraud prevention measures, etc.) would not be worth it, were it not for the fact that a lot of vouchers go unspent for various reasons: expired, lost, never used as someone doesn't have store X near them, firm goes into administration, etc.