In follow up to the post “Banana Republic Canada: Cheating its Customers“, Nina who has worked at GAP for a long time explains why people get cheated with GAP, Old Navy & Banana Republic’s “gift cards”. Thanks for this very useful info Nina. It will sure help a lot of us avoid getting tricked again.

Hey

I myself worked at the Gap for the longest time, and unfortunately this is not a new thing with these so-called gift cards ! They are actually not real gift cards but a sort of promotional card which is most certainly not the same. If you purchase something with a real gift card at GAP, Banana, or Old Navy you will be able to return items / exchange them etc. and your money will be put back onto a gift card.

However with this promotion and a few others, it is nearly impossible to get your money back, because it is a one time deal. I personally think it’s not a fair policy and as a cashier always made a point of letting my customer’s know about this “fine print” that most people do not pay attention too.

In the end, your best chances are to either ask if you can exchange the item against the same item in a differnet size or colour, but in my experience that is all that the manager’s will do for you (even though you might get lucky and run into a store that is a bit more lenient with their policy). The only other thing you can do is to call Gap customer services, and they most of the time will send you some kind of a gift card or so just to keep their customer’s happy.

In the longrun, the best thing to do when you use any “giftcard” is to read the fineprint and ask the cashier about the exchange policy etc., before using the card to make a purchase because sometimes you will run into these problems and I myself have had hundereds of customers which were left standing there without a store credit or anything. It sucks, but it is actually part of their policy and I doubt you will be able to do much about it. The only thing that might change the mind of the people at the head office would be thounds upon thousands of complaints and requests to change their policy. You can always give that a try too.

But for now, as I said, your best solution to this is to be an informed consumer, because this happens all the time, and you really will not find a lot of cashiers that will give you the heads up on these policies (because in the end it’s bad for bussiness).

I hope all this works out for you guys though !

Oh, and by the way. If you do make a huge purchase and get one of these facy little “gift cards” and you return the whole purchase, you still get to keep your cards unless you volunteer to give them back. I have never encountered a situation where that was a problem.

Nina