The Tower Group holiday gift card sales preliminary stats are in (article): $61 billion in gift card sales for the fourth quarter 08 as compared with $70 billion last year. That is going to be a little more than the 5% drop they had earlier predicted for full year 2008. The most intesting tidbit from their report is that open-loop gift cards are expected to be almost half of those sales, at $28 billion. This as compared with open-loop gift cards making up about 35% of gift card sales last year.

This information is very important when you consider that almost no state or federal laws that apply to gift cards apply to open-loop ones.