For my mother’s birthday I gave her two VISA gift cards,
which I found very convenient at the first time because she could choose her
gifts whenever she will have time and buy whatever she will want to buy.
I remember that the gift card came with a long instruction
booklet that we didn’t read at that moment because we were all busy opening
other birthday presents and with the celebration and finally she threw it away.
Next day, I went with her to a shoe store we had a look and
she decided to buy a pair of nice shoes, when we arrived at the cashier we
tried to pay with her gift card, and the
cashier looked at the card and told us that we have to slide it in the card reader device,
I followed her instructions and the card reader ask me for a pin, our first
problem, we didn’t have a pin, it was a
gift card, at that moment I remembered that we didn’t read the instructions and
that my mother threw them away. I
checked the card and it had a message that
indicated to go to a website, the card also had a QR code which I tried to read
but which open a website and ask me to download an app for my phone or fill a
form where I had to enter all the data from the card, which included the 16
digits number. I did not have the time to do that at that moment, then I paid
the shoes with my regular credit card and we went home.
At home, I started to check how the gift card worked, I
entered to the website and I had to sign in and fill many fields like the number
of the card (16 digits), create a pin for the gift card, etc., it was a lot of work for just a gift card.
Considering that my mom is a 60 years old woman, and I can
say she doesn’t have too much experience with technology, I started to realize
that maybe my gift was not the best idea for her.
Finally with this experience I realized that at this moment
we are living in world where we will find an app for almost everything, but we
have to be careful because with some products a simple gift like a gift card
(which has nothing to do with technology) can become a very cumbersome process
for someone with is not very tech savvy.
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