Voucher Rip-off

dedicus

Why do companies put expiry dates on vouchers, for example my sister bought me some VUE cinema vouchers, paid £20 cash (no expiry date on that) and recieved 4 x £5 vouchers with only a 6 month life. Is this legal?
:mad:

Astaroth

There is no reason why a voucher legally cannot have a lifespan... it would be somewhat similar to you buying some food and then complaining that it has a use by date on it.

Things like vouchers and special offers are a bit of an accounting headache... whilst you have the cash sitting in your bank account you cannot count it as profit yet because the services/ goods have not yet been provided for and yet it could be that it is 99.9% profit because the vouchers have been lost/ destroyed/ never will be spent. How long do you leave it before you can write off the liability?

You can also have another issue of technology.... how does your system "accept" the vouchers? Ideally you dont want it to be just a manual input because then fraud is the easiest.... over time the technologies will change and if you dont have an expiry date you must train all staff on how to recognise vouchers given out 50 years ago as well as build a system that can accept them.

6 months does really feel like the minimum acceptable limit to life but I would imagine that 12 months is more common.