Not sure why I never thought to do this before. The results for the search term “gift card” in Google are very telling. Six of the top 10 results are for open-loop gift cards, you know, the kind that come with all the fees, are hard to spend all the way to zero, and are exempt from almost every gift card law passed to date. At this point there are probably more open-loop gift cards sold than closed-loop. I suspect when we see the full numbers for 2008 sales, this will be confirmed.

At some point, the issuers of these cards are going to have to pay the piper. They’ve gotten a free ride on the sleazy profit bandwagon for too long.

I predict that the public stink around these gift cards will come from seemingly nowhere and all of a sudden every legislator will want to get their hands on some new legislation banning fees and expiration dates and all the bad stuff they do. With the way the economy is going and how sick people are of getting ripped off, I’d say this has a good chance of happening in the next year or two.