Gift Voucher/card Redemption Rip Off

[Polyal]

Just wanted to share an experience that I had the other day to see if it has happened to anyone else and get your thoughts.

Last christmas we were given a voucher to a shoe company (retail chain), during the year we never got around to using it so we went last week to use it.

Now it was only $50 so its not the end of the world, but for me its the principle of the matter.

Date of issue was 23/12/08, so naturally you would think that 23/12/09 would be the expiry. So we go up and use the voucher and the assistant states that the voucher is out of date, I said no look at the date of issue we still have a few days.

He checks it on the system again and sure enough no, sorry sir but this gift card is only valid for 3 months.

3 months!

So we had gone to the trouble of having the right shoes selected for our son (18 months) so we weren't about to say no we dont want it, I was fuming so I just handed the cash over and walked out.

Now in reality it was my fault, I shouldn't have assumed it was only for 3 months but to be honest Ive never heard of a gift card from a very large corporation only being valid for 3 months.

I mean what if we were on holidays or god forbid didn't have the spare time to visit there lovely establishment?

Worst still is that the person who paid for the voucher in the first place has just thrown $50 down the drain.

So what happens now? There must be so many cases of this happening and companies are pocketing the expired cards/vouchers, is it not border line stealing?

Far enough there should be a limit, im not saying you should be able to claim it 2 years later but 3 months is just silly. It was store credit and not a predetermined item which they could have brought at $x dollars.

This happened to anyone else? I would have been super ****ed if it was $100 or more.