Retail cards get spent eventually because retail is a chore you have to do anyway. Restaurant cards are different. Using one requires an occasion, a reservation, and a group of people who all want the same cuisine on the same night. That is three conditions, and the card usually loses.
New York adds its own pressure. The turnover here is brutal, and a card to a restaurant that has closed becomes a general unsecured claim on a business that no longer exists, which is a polite way of saying nothing. Cards to places that are still open often survive their own usefulness anyway, because the neighbourhood changed, or you did.
Then there is the remainder problem. You spend most of a fifty-dollar card and the last eight dollars never justifies a trip across town. Multiplied across a city, eight dollars at a time, that is a serious amount of unspent money sitting in drawers.
Gift cards are not the same as deal vouchers
Two things end up in the same drawer and behave very differently. A gift card is store credit, and in most states it cannot expire or be quietly eaten by monthly fees, which is why a forgotten one is usually still good. A promotional voucher from a deals site is another animal: it generally carries a promotional value that does expire and a paid value that does not. Check which one you are holding before you decide it is dead.
What to do with the ones you already have
Check every balance before you plan anything. Most chains let you do it online in under a minute, and independents will tell you over the phone. You will find at least one card with more on it than you assumed and at least one with less.
Then stop saving them for occasions. A gift card used on a Tuesday is worth exactly what a gift card used on an anniversary is worth, and the Tuesday version actually happens. Order lunch with it. Send someone to pick up a coffee with it. Spend the awkward remainder on a pastry rather than waiting for a dinner that will make the numbers come out even.
For the ones you will genuinely never use, the honest options are to give them to somebody who will, or to move them.
The other side of the drawer
All that unwanted credit does not disappear. It feeds a secondary market: people sell cards they will not use, and other people buy discounted gift cards below face value and spend them normally. If you eat out often, buying credit for a place you already visit at ten percent under face is a real discount on something you were going to pay for anyway.
The catch is sourcing, and it matters more than the size of the discount. A card bought through a marketplace that verifies balances before listing behaves like any other card. A card bought from a stranger in a message thread is a gamble, because the previous owner still has the code and can spend it whenever they like. Check the balance the day it arrives, use it soon rather than saving it, and treat an unusually steep discount on a popular brand as a warning rather than a find.
There is also a version that skips the card entirely, mostly used for retail rather than restaurants: you post what you want, somebody who holds store credit places the order, and the payment sits in escrow until the parcel arrives. No code changes hands in either direction.
The drawer, revisited
Empty it this week. Check every balance, bin the cards to restaurants that have closed, and put the rest somewhere you will actually see them. Then spend them on an ordinary night, which is the only kind of night most of them will ever get.
