The CEO of the National Retail Federation, Tracy Mullin, speculated that the reason for this could be traced to the psychology of the consumer. Every shopper out there has been trained to respond to sales, and Mullin thinks that shoppers will gravitate toward actual items that are on sale as opposed to simply storing money on a piece of plastic for later use. When people buy presents for Christmas, they aren't just thinking about the recipient. They, too, want to feel they got something of value handed to them.

That's always been kind of funny to me, because when I shop for presents, I just want to get the present and get out of the store as fast as I can. I've never been a sale-searcher, but some people are obsessed with it. Yet, wouldn't having the choice of storing whatever value one wanted to on a gift card be, in some philosophical sense, a sale in and of itself? Because if you only wanted to spend $25 on someone, then placing $25 on a card would be in agreement with the self-imposed limit, correct?

No matter. There are tons of sales hounds out there who would scoff at such logic. At any rate, this survey had better be taken seriously by all the retail district managers out there. They better push gift cards with an urgency they've never felt before in their careers. It needs to be a priority. The first quarter of '09 is going to be rough on the consumer, since this economic crisis is not going away. Therefore, a large number of gift card recipients hitting the sales floors across America could help to improve comps. Remember that a gift card recipient may spend a little more than the value of the gift card. That's a phenomenon that retailers have learned to count on.

So, as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, etc., push merchandise out their doors, they should attach a gift card or two to every transaction. And I'm not talking about those promotional cards that one gets if one buys a certain item -- those are more like rebates. I'm talking honest-to-goodness gift cards that someone puts fresh capital on. Of course, retailers tend to want to push inventory out the door. Believe me, I understand. Just designate a few people in the corporate culture as gift card czars and task them with marketing the heck out of those rectangular goodies (actually, gift cards can take on all kinds of shapes these days). With gift cards now succumbing to the great financial crisis of our time, I hope the powers that be take the value of these products more seriously than ever before.

Disclosure: I don't own any company mentioned; positions can change at any time. I also plan to spend the same amount of money on gift cards this year as I do every year.