converting gift card of $10 or less to cash (Ca)

Lot of cash back websites like Ebates, Ultimate Rewards Mall or various airlines online shopping portal offer great promotion where you can earn anywhere from 2x to 20x miles/points per dollar spent (2% to 20% cashback) on purchase from various online stores. Some of these portals also provide opportunity to earn miles/points or cashback for buying merchant gift cards. Lot of the folks in miles world buy merchant gift cards to earn lucrative miles through these portals as gift cards tend to be most flexible and can be used for any future purchase from those stores. The side-effect of buying gift cards is sometimes you will end up having few dollars left over in the gift card which you have no idea of what to do with. But what if you could redeem those gift cards for cash?

Each state has its own rule concerning the gift card expiry as well as rules governing converting them to cash or check. One of the state with more consumer friendly law is California. The law states that under legal guide S-11 (more information can be found here) any store that sells its own branded gift card is required by law to allow customer to cash out the gift card if the value of the gift card is less than $10. What this means is that at any point your gift card balance falls below $10, the merchant is required to provide the provision to en-cash that gift card for its equivalent cash value (either by cash or check). 

Although the law provides for this provision most of stores associate are not aware of this and would simply refuse to en-cash the gift card even if the dollar value of gift card is less than $10. Since this provision is provided by law, make sure you Insist for the cash back and if need be speak with the supervisor or the store manager who will be more than willing to consider it. This knowledge of cashing out the gift card is a great way of getting rid of gift cards with a value of less than $10. Below are couple of examples to leverage this:

1. You have a gift card of $35 for Sears. The item you are looking to buy is of value $26 (including taxes). You can make a purchase using a gift card without worrying about the balance amount on the gift card as after the purchase you can claim the remaining $9 in cash.
   
2. You received a gift card of $10 for Kohls for participating in some consumer survey. Since you never shop at Kohls the best way to liquidate this gift card is to buy any candy or gum for $1 and claim the remaining amount on the gift card as cash.

Also note, in most of the instances you do not need to be resident of California as stores do not even ask for your identity except in cases where the store has a policy of sending a check for the remaining value of gift card. Since all US states has their own variant of this law it would be helpful to know what are the rules for other states  concerning en-cashing the gift card. You can find information about law related to gift cards in other states here  which could help you leveraging this deal. This could potentially help you getting rid of those small value gift cards you might have either bought or accumulated through some promotion. 

Note: I do get referal bonus if you use Ebates link above to open your Ebates account. I do appreciate your using the link. 

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