Bonus Gift Cards: The Quiet Black Friday Perk

Doorbusters and sitewide sales get most of the attention every November, and this year Black Friday falls on November 27. Meanwhile, a quieter promotion sits near the register, on restaurant table tents, and at the bottom of promotional emails. It's the bonus gift card: buy a gift card, and the business adds an extra card on top.

Used well, it can turn spending you'd do anyway into real savings that last into the new year. For a wider look at the season, Discoup collects the retailer promotions planned for Black Friday weekend in one place.

How These Offers Typically Work

The structure is usually simple. You buy a gift card worth a set amount, and the business gives you a separate promotional card as a reward.

Restaurant chains are the best-known examples, but retailers, coffee shops, salons, and entertainment venues often run similar promotions during Black Friday week, either in store, online, or both.

The key detail is that you usually end up with two different products. The card you paid for generally works like any regular gift card. The bonus card is a marketing incentive, and it often comes with its own rules. Some businesses send it by email, some hand it over at the counter, and some require you to activate it before you can use it.

The Strings Attached

The most common restriction is timing. Promotional cards often can't be used until a specific date, commonly sometime in the new year, and they may expire within a few weeks or months after that. A card you forget about until spring may be worthless by then.

Regular gift cards have federal protection: they generally can't be sold with an expiration date sooner than five years after they're issued or last loaded. Promotional cards are exempt from those expiration and fee limits, although they still have to be labeled as promotional and show their expiration date. That's why a bonus card can run out much sooner than you'd expect.

Other common limits include a minimum purchase, one card per visit, dine-in only use at restaurants, exclusion of alcohol or certain menu items, a rule against combining the bonus with other offers, and a cap on how many bonus cards one customer can receive. Read the terms on the card itself, not just the advertisement.

Who Comes Out Ahead

These deals work best for people who are already loyal customers. A bonus card from a store you rarely visit is worth very little, while one from a place you'd go anyway is a different matter. If your household goes to the same pizza place twice a month, buying a gift card during the promotion amounts to paying for future meals at a better rate.

Gift-givers can benefit too. One option is to give the regular card as a present and keep the bonus card for yourself, which makes the gift cost a bit less in practice.

One word of caution: buy gift cards only from the business directly or from authorized retailers. Gift cards are a favorite tool of scammers, and third-party resale listings around the holidays deserve some skepticism.

Making the Bonus Count

The value of a bonus gift card depends on whether you actually use it. Pick businesses you'd visit anyway, write the bonus card's usable dates on your calendar the day you get it, and check the terms again before you head out. A promotion that most shoppers walk past can then become a real reward for planning ahead.