Gift Vouchers

I found a £10 gift voucher at they back of a draw. Yippee! Oh, hang on... It's for Woolworths. Bugger! Oh well, that's off to the tin with the Pesetas and Deutschmarks.

Giving people gift vouchers as presents is a bit of an odd activity. Why give someone a voucher to be spent in one shop when you could get cash and spend it in any shop in the whole country? I suppose there is a certain embarrassment factor in giving money as a gift - at least to an adult. I can remember as a child that a £5 note in a birthday card was a top present (I suppose they were worth more then). I also received the odd voucher - for the likes John Menzies or HMV. These were fine because I liked to buy books and records, but it involved a parental trip into town to choose anything and, quite often, I would have to stump up some of my own cash as the voucher wouldn't cover what I wanted.

I suppose the advantage of gift vouchers for adults means that it will be just that: a gift, something special and personal that the household budget wouldn't justify. I think that's why I like Amazon vouchers. They sell loads of things I like that I'd love to buy but always feel rather guilty about paying for when fixing a broken light fitting or replacing a worn out chair seem to be much higher priorities. The other thing is that I don't have to make a special journey to buy things off Amazon; I just choose online and then have a couple of days' happy expectation as to what the postman might bring - followed by a couple of days annoyance that they have used one of those couriers that couldn't tell there arse from their elbow.

Quite why the Woolies voucher was missed, I don't know. There was a Woolworth branch on my way to work for over ten years and they did sell things I'd like to buy - like CDs, videos and... sewing stuff? I remember when my wife started working for IBM, they had an introduction pack for overseas workers and described how things worked in the Greater Glasgow area. They listed local shops and the sort of things they sold; Woolworths was described as a shop where you can buy "all those nerdy household things".

I can't think where I buy "nerdy things" from these days. It's certainly not Woolies.