Need to know
- Gift cards are just like cash and considered a prepayment – a retailer shouldn’t have the right to decide when you’re allowed to use them
- Nothing in the Australian Consumer Law gives retailers the option of rejecting a gift card for purchases
- After a backlash fueled by customer complaints and media reports, JB Hi-Fi has reworked its ill-conceived policy
(This story was updated on 9 October to reflect JB Hi-Fi’s reversal on its gift card policy.)
In JB Hi-Fi’s 2020 annual report, the company says “gift cards and store credits are considered a prepayment for goods and services to be delivered in the future”.
But even though the goods have technically been paid for, JB Hi-Fi gave itself the right in recent days to choose which products gift-card holders can and can’t buy before ultimately rethinking the policy.
That seemed pretty shonky to us, since gift-card