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It's wonderful to have you here on the Clark Howard Show where it's about you learning ways to save more and spend less.

And don't let anyone ever rip you off.

And I want to talk about a no deal at all.

If you are a long time listener, you know how I feel about gift cards.

But in spite of my feeling about them gift cards have remained a very popular thing for people to give other people for gifts when you don't know what to buy some of you're trying to save time, you just buy them a gift card.

Well, that has become a very dicey thing this year for a couple of reasons.

Retailers are closing in huge numbers.

There was a report from Bloomberg that we're going to see something around 25,000 retail stores close.

And that's two and a half times last year's total.

And a lot of chains are going to vanish in total.

A lot of small operators are going to close as well.

And those gift cards that you have for retail stores could end up going to dust.

You know, it's different when a retail store is worried about its reputation when it files for bankruptcy.

And one of the first motions they'll file with the bankruptcy court judge is to honor gift cards through the bankruptcy process.

Historically though, a retailer would be reducing their number of locations and be preserving their reputation.

Moving forward, but now we have chains that are just saying we give up and they just close everything and they're gone.

The gift cards vanish into thin air.

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