Grocery stores, retailers, and so forth should give away gift cards. Now I’m not suggesting that they give cards away, to everyone that enters their store. Yet, I believe they should come up with sensible ways to go about making such a reality.

Since I understand that nothing really is free in life, I’m going to explain one way in which companies could give away gift cards, and help their own bottom lines.

Companies could create a special gift card, which I would name a “flip card,” which would only be activated once a certain amount of attached coupons are used within a certain predetermined time frame. (Will explain in full detail below.)

In order to receive such a card, individuals would have to visit the company’s website and accept the flip card challenge. The flip card challenge would be similar to the following stated:

(1)  Companies could offer a free flip card to individuals who give away coupons that offered a certain discount on a preset limited purchase, and such give aways resulted in a certain amount of such coupons being used during a predetermined time frame.

For example, an individual could receive a $100 flip card, after passing out coupons that offer a 15% discount on purchases of $100 or more, if 40 of such coupons are used within 90 days from the time in which the individual accepted the flip card challenge.

If the individual accomplishes at least 25% of the attempted goal, which in the above case would be 10, he or she would be credited for half of such (5), and they would have such credited to the next challenge of $100 or greater in this case.

(2) Companies could offer premium flip cards ($5,000; $10,000; etc.) to individuals who were willing to bid on such cards.

The bidding process would start with the company offering a premium flip card of a certain value, setting a mandatory coupon starting point, and setting a mandatory time frame starting point.

Individuals would have to be willing to at least match one side of the previous bid, and to outbid such a bidder on the other side. For example, if the previous bidder said they would be able to get 1,000 coupons redeemed within 145 days, the next bidder could either out bid the previous bidder by bidding 1,001/ 145 or 1,000/ 144.

Now there would be a lot of safeguards in place to deter spamming… for example, if someone receives a virtual coupon via spamming, they would be able to click a “if spammed icon,” which would automatically penalize the offending participant by reducing their redeemed coupon count by one point.

The above stated is just one example of the innovation that could occur with gift cards. And I believe companies should innovate as much as possible.