Like most high-schoolers, Benoit gets gift cards for birthdays and holidays and puts most of them to use. But, if it's a bookstore, it'll just waste away in her wallet.
The real issue here is the way high school English approaches reading, it turns even great novels into a chore. With journal entries, reading quizzes over minor details, etc etc you can't actually sit back and enjoy the books.
I hated reading in high school, but since then I have found that when I read classics similar to those people read in high school, I enjoy them much more than I did back then, even if it's hard to find the time to do so.
I think that goes for lots of learning. When it's forced on someone else's schedule it's hard to enjoy, but when you're genuinely interested it's much more fun and productive.
I think to boil it down to the "real issue" is probably oversimplifying it. I agree that high school English does not encourage reading, but how would you propose they do it differently?
Especially when one considers the variety of items most bookstores have. Barnes and Nobel has a music section, calendars, magazines, trinkets, comic books and a cafe. I think all big bookstores are the same. It isn't like one would actually have to read to shop there.
I don't think teenagers are as against bookstores as people would make it seem. While at my local borders/barnes/used book stores I see teenagers around all the time. Some kids will always be interested in reading, and that's great.
are the teenagers just there hanging out and socializing with each other (a common occurrence if there's a cafe inside the bookstore), or are they actually deeply engaged in reading?
> If you accept the offer, just mail in your card and within a few days, cardpool.com will mail you a check.
I wonder how they deal with gift cards bought with stolen credit cards? If the gift card gets cancelled by the retailer after Cardpool verifies it and sends the cheque, they're out the money.
This could be an easy way to liquidate the balance on a card.
Also people steal items from places like Home Depot and then return the items for gift cards.
I met a guy who that is all he did. He would steal the items and had his girlfriend return them. Eventually he upped his tactics and started representing himself as a representative from a manufacturer and would do a "recall" of all of stock on a particular item (swiffer wet mop cleaning pads) and he got them all and returned them to other stores.
I forgot one of his main things was to go through the trash when they threw away items (maybe they couldn't rma them or whatever) and he would return the items to a different store.
He traded the home depot cards for things, cash, trade, he pretty much lived off of it not sure what he is doing now that was awhile ago.
It's not just traditional media, it's a cornerstone of their retarded blog "replacements" too ... linking to any of your own shit = extra ad impressions while a visitor searches for context and instead gets ... every piece of crap Engadget's ever written containing the word Sony.
I have experimented with this and found that unloading gift cards at a good price is easy via eBay or "contextual ads" or search engine ads. But, there really isn't an opportunity to establish a competitive advantage on the sell side. Competitors will bid up these channels and, importantly, people can figure out how to Google "buy gift cards" once you present this idea to them.
This business is really about finding a way to get people to sell you gift cards way below face value. But however much PR or advertising you do, most people will just Google "sell gift cards." And, again, you will just be doing work for whomever (of the n existing competitors) ranks highest in the SERPs.
So if that is the plan, you are really just trying to build another SERP merchant, but have the added complication of having to deal with fraud when sourcing your product (and I don't think fraudsters need to be super clever to walk away with a lot of their money).
The trade is especially big on eBay, since Microsoft will give you %8 cashback on all 'buy it now' transactions just for using Bing as your referrer to eBay.
This one has no popover, supports Costco cards (which, last I checked CardPool didn't) and offers cash or Amazon cards in return: http://www.plasticjungle.com/pjweb/
Also, anyone who gets below -10, or something, should have their commenting ability either just totally killed (which is basically banning them, since their votes wouldn't count and they couldn't comment, though I guess they could post some submissions to get back into commenting territory and then fix themselves) or at least frozen until a moderator decides that they aren't spamming/intensely trolling.
My first comment was a detailed criticism of his rant, noting that (1) registering multiple users and upvoting your own content is gaming the system, (2) when pg criticized him for it he said "I got you" but clearly didn't "get" what pg was getting at, (3) his failure to link to the original on twitpic was a violation of HN's submission guidelines and pg was actually cutting him slack by requesting that he include a link instead of changing the HN submission, and (4) HN's guidelines explicitly state that editors may change your title if you editorialize it. I noted that for someone so stuck on pg not giving him guidelines, he was awfully ignorant of those guidelines.
They stripped all of that out of my post, leaving only a poorly edited variant of my conclusion.
I added an addendum about how "egotistical, pompous, and self-serving" it was to spam this to HN, which he edited to say something libelous about PG.
I sent a note saying how classy that edit was, which was edited to use a different username (!) and was totally incoherent.
same thing happened to me. i left a joke comment, and somebody edited it into an ominous-sounding threat. thankfully, i wasn't foolish enough to include any real-life indentifiable details.
This makes me cry.