{"id":31,"date":"2008-09-08T18:52:17","date_gmt":"2008-09-08T18:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=31"},"modified":"2010-04-03T20:46:34","modified_gmt":"2010-04-03T20:46:34","slug":"31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=31","title":{"rendered":"The growth of Gift Cards I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google News Archive (historical news archives) has a great feature that shows a timline with the frequency a search term shows up in articles. Searching on &#8220;gift card&#8221; gives the following timeline.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/timeline.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-32\" title=\"timeline\" src=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/timeline.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"613\" height=\"114\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/timeline.jpg 613w, http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/timeline-300x55.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 613px) 100vw, 613px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is a pretty good representation of the rise of gift cards. This timeline has gift cards on the scene way before I thought they were popular, which I previously thought was 2002.<\/p>\n<p>Before about 1998, a gift card was a card that came with a gift apparently if you look at some of the hits. 2008 is smaller because it is not yet done (duh).<\/p>\n<p>Also interesting, I found a reference to prepaid Visa gift cards from 2000. I think that after 9\/11, pressure was put on the debit card gift card issuers to make them scarce because they were hard to trace (i.e. National Security issue). They disappeared for a few years mostly and then started making a comeback in the last few years. They were certainly a lot harder to find a few years ago than they are now. In 2005 I could only find them at the mall; now they are in just about every grocery store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google News Archive (historical news archives) has a great feature that shows a timline with the frequency a search term shows up in articles. Searching on &#8220;gift card&#8221; gives the following timeline. This is a pretty good representation of the rise of gift cards. This timeline has gift cards on the scene way before I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}