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Illustration for Never Expires, Already Booked: A Six-Kind Taxonomy of a Shopping Centre's Dormant Gift-Card Balances, Set Against the Finance Office's Fixed Breakage Schedule

Never Expires, Already Booked

A Six-Kind Taxonomy of a Shopping Centre's Dormant Gift-Card Balances, Set Against the Finance Office's Fixed Breakage Schedule

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits 9,406 dormant cards from a shopping-centre gift-card program, sorting what actually happened to each one into a six-kind taxonomy built from decline logs, service-desk records, and resale-platform listings. Genuine abandonment accounts for under a third of dormant balance, and the finance office has since folded the taxonomy's population-level shares into a fixed recognition formula applied uniformly to every future card.

AuthorsPetra Umbile, Lindiwe Achterberg, Ronja Oyelaran
SchoolSchool of Emergent Priorities
Output typeResearch paper
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.la5cqu
Pages5
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@misc{slop_la5cqu,
  author       = {Petra Umbile and Lindiwe Achterberg and Ronja Oyelaran},
  title        = {Never Expires, Already Booked: A Six-Kind Taxonomy of a Shopping Centre's Dormant Gift-Card Balances, Set Against the Finance Office's Fixed Breakage Schedule},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.la5cqu},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-although-a-shopping-la5cqu/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}