Barnes and Nobles will not honor Borders Gift Cards

As you may already know Barnes and Nobles, now B&N, bought out the intellectual property of Borders. After Borders declared bankruptcy they won court approval to sale off its intellectual property, including their customer database, to their competitor Barnes and Nobles, after having to resolve a privacy issue with their shoppers. The agreement was that all customers in the Borders customer database will be sent an email with the option to allow their information to be transferred over to Barnes and Nobles. Though this takes care of the shoppers privacy issue one thing that didn't get mentioned were people who have Borders gift cards.

When Barnes and Nobles purchased Borders they had decided they will not redeem Borders gift cards, which makes a gift card from Borders no longer valid. Because of this Borders was able to report unused gift cards as revenue and that revenue has been distributed among the top creditors of Borders. If you have a Borders gift card you can try to contact Barnes and Nobles and see what they say, but from what we are hearing from customers Barnes and Nobles either do not know what to do with the gift cards or they are telling customers they cannot redeem the gift cards from Borders and in effect, they are now useless.

Though bankrupt companies such are Borders are not obligated to accept gift cards, they accepted them through the end of its liquidation. But now that B&N has bought their property they are not obligated to accept any gift cards from Borders. This should be interesting, if enough customer backlash happens maybe B&N will work out a deal to start accepting Borders gift cards again, only time will tell. Until then we recommend if you do not want to give up on your gift card, try to contact Barnes and Nobles gift card department to see what they say. Let us know if you find out any additional information to help others who have Borders gift cards out there.