When checking Costco’s website a few days ago, they had numerous gift cards available for ordering as normal. At some point since I last checked, Costco has pulled all physical third party gift cards sales from their website.
Reader EW tipped me off about this today and sure enough, they only have a handful of gift cards for sale online, all of which are eGift cards rather than physical ones.
The physical gift cards that Costco used to carry were mainly for restaurants and provided great value for personal use as they were usually discounted by 20-30%. They did carry gift cards for other stores though like Build-A-Bear Workshop.
Costco hasn’t provided an update on their website as to the reason for this change. I suspect it’s one of two reasons, or perhaps a combination of the two. One is that similar to Amazon, they’re wanting to focus on fulfilling orders for essential items right now. The other reason might be that there are logistical issues with obtaining the physical gift cards, perhaps because their supplier isn’t producing them due to manufacturing staff being home right now.
Whatever the reason, I imagine this is a temporary change and that if and when things start getting back to normal, physical gift cards will return to their website.
Update: A reader has advised that there’s a wide range of eGift cards that are no longer being sold on their website either, so it’s not only physical gift cards that are affected. That might mean my speculation as to the reasons why is incorrect, unless they’re having logistical issues with some eGift card fulfillment too.
Maybe they don’t want to take the risk of selling prepaid services provided by companies that may not exist in a few months. Because of their return policy.
Gift cards can’t ever be returned though once purchased, so I wouldn’t have thought they’d be any worse off.
Even so, a store like Costco may not want to deal with the blowback and/or their customers losing money.
No Costco will take them back if the business closes. I had bought some Bar Louie a couple months ago and then was able to return after they went bankrupt and closed 95% of the locations including the ones nearby.
Wow, I knew their return policy was generous, but that’s even more generous than I would’ve expected.
We asked about the gift cards over the weekend, and were told that they were pulled from the stores and returned to the vendors last week.
Thanks for sharing that. It’s interesting that they’ve returned the in-store cards too.
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