Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Gift Card Dispensers

I frequently find myself coming up with ideas that I think are genius. I'm sure you all do too, but mine really are. Anyways, I don't know what else to do with them, so you are free to hack my ideas and make money off of them. Most of my ideas are probably already stolen from others, or have already been invented and I just don't know it. As a landscaping technician, I had the brilliant idea of having a mulch blower that spreads mulch out of a huge tube. I guess it already exists.

So anyways, I was shopping this Christmas and thought of another great idea. First of all, money is just as valid a gift as gift cards are. Only better, because you're not restricted to one store. Sorry, just had to throw that in there.

So here's the idea. Someone should create big gift card dispensers to put in malls and large shopping centers. They could be next to coke machines, or maps, or just located at the entrance or any other convenient place. Then you put your credit card in (like at a gas station), select the store you want your card from, then punch in the amount you want on the gift card. The machine sets it all up electronically, then shoots out your gift card. You could do all your shopping in one stop.

Then you could have deals with other stores, so Wal-Mart could make a deal with Borders or whoever and put some of their gift cards in a store dispenser. People would go to Wal-Mart to do all their holiday shopping. It's seems easy enough to do.

Yeah, so that's pretty much it. Of course if you were really smart, you'd just do all your shopping online. And, Doug happened to write a relevant post on his blog yesterday. It's about buying and selling gift cards online. Check it out here.

1 comment:

lemming said...

An excellent idea - the only problem is that I refuse to go into a mall, for any reason, after Thanksgiving and I'm developing an allergic reaction to on-line shopping. Perhaps a constant stream of regifting is in my future... :-)