Amazon has reportedly removed its popular gift cards from a number of New York City retailers, leaving shoppers and retailers in the dark about the sudden move.
Gift cards recently disappeared from shelves at Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Walgreens, CVS and Buffalo-based NBC affiliate Wegmans. 2 On Your Side reported Friday.
An Amazon spokesperson told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the e-commerce giant occasionally experiments with ways to purchase gift cards, and that gift cards have always been available on its website.
While it’s not new for retailers to remove gift cards from their shelves, doing so without explanation is unusual, Charles Lindsay, a business professor at the University at Buffalo, told a Buffalo television station.
“Typically, there’s transparency about gift card pick-up,” Lindsay said.
Lindsay said gift cards are typically recalled for one of four reasons: gift card fraud issues, a batch with a faulty activation code, to make space for a new gift card promotion, changes in gift card regulations or A/B testing to gauge how well the cards are selling.
Some retailers have seen large recalls of gift cards.
A Wegmans spokesperson told The Post that Amazon has removed gift cards from all of its New York state stores.
A spokesperson for Tops Friendly Markets, a chain with locations in New York, Vermont and Pennsylvania, told the NBC affiliate that Amazon gift cards had been removed from stores across New York state.
CVS referred The Washington Post to Amazon, while Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Walgreens did not respond to requests for comment.
Employees at Dollar Tree and Dollar General in Western New York told 2 On Your Side that representatives from Amazon or employees from Amazon’s vending company visited their stores two weeks ago and began removing gift cards from shelves.
Lindsay said he suspects Amazon is removing gift cards from its stores to test whether it can make a profit from them, because retailers take a cut of every gift card sale.
“It’s a small percentage, but they’re getting some of that load,” Lindsay said.
The business professor said Amazon will “deal with it at the end of the day, after the dust has settled,” and that Amazon must ask itself whether it is truly “in the clear” when it comes to revenue and profits, especially since it sells gift cards on its site, allowing it to avoid passing a portion of the purchase price on to brick-and-mortar retailers.
