Remember back in the day (not too long ago, actually!) when you ran around town looking for the perfect gift for someone?

NO MORE!

The answer: gift cards.

Gift cards come in two forms: physical and electronic.  With a physical gift certificate, a person is given an actual “card” with the amount of the gift certificate electronically encoded into the card.  Some smaller retailers still use paper versions of gift certificates, but those retailers are few and far between.  An electronic gift certificate is popular with many online retailers.  Here’s how it works: go to your favorite online retailer, purchase a gift card, check “electronic version”, enter the recipient’s details, pay for it, hit send and VOILA!  In a matter of moments, your present is delivered.  Your recipient will then receive an email detailing the gift, with a redemption code inside the email.  In order to redeem it, they simply load up their shopping cart, hit buy and copy and paste their certificate number into the appropriate field.  What could be easier?

Physical gift cards are also equally popular and many chains’ gift cards have become collector’s items, with individuals vying for the prized ones.  For example, Starbucks plastic gift cards are highly collectible and sought-after– so much so that people actually will purchase the gift cards with no value on them, from ebay.  There’s also specific forums dedicated to trading Starbucks gift certificates (whoduh thunk it?).  A few years ago, Best Buy had a gift card with an LED display across it.  You could personalize the message for the recipient.  Needless to say, these were popular with techno geeks and highly sought after.  They paid a pretty penny for them and, eventually, Best Buy stopped allowing people to purchase them with just a penny value to them.  They were really nifty, however– people would get them and mod them to do other cool things!  Needless to say, I never got my hands on one

At any rate, gift cards are the perfect gift for anyone, living almost anywhere in the world!

So, if you find yourself in a gift-giving dilemma, never fear, gift cards are here!  (And waiting until the last minute isn’t an issue either…)