According to a recent report, the holiday outlook for gift cards spending is flat to down 5%. At $24 billion for just the holiday season, that is still a lot. The good news is that people are focusing more on using gift cards for essentials; hopefully this means that they are also keeping better track of their gift cards and remembering to spend them. It would be great of gift card breakage (what doesn’t get spend by consumers each year and issuers get to keep eventually – around 10% of the face value) goes down significantly.