JD Sports’ move to reissue more than 5,500 gift cards to Irish customers at a cost of €250,000 after it wrongly told them they had expired highlights the importance of legislation covering what used to be the wild west of consumer spending.
It also underlines the power individuals have to effect change and shines a spotlight on the positive role the consumer watchdog plays in protecting people from the mistakes and misdeeds of businesses.
And it is evidence that as consumers, we all could do better when it comes to vouchers and how we would do well to spend them when we get them, rather than hoarding them or putting them to one side only to forget they are there.
The JD Sports story started on the pages of The Irish Times when a reader called Noel contacted us on behalf of his son, who had been given the runaround by JD Sports and told on several occasions that the voucher that he had been given just over a year earlier could no longer be used as it had expired.
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Noel did not realise it at the time but by sending that one short email he managed to get Irish consumers refunds worth €250,000.
He told us that he had complained to the company and eventually got the value of his son’s voucher back, but he got in touch to see if we could highlight the issue to a wider audience.
That is what we did.
The retailer confirmed to the Pricewatch section of the paper that Noel’s son was not alone in being misled and other gift cards it sold over a five-year period also had the wrong expiry.
When we heard that, we contacted the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) and it launched an investigation which culminated in new cards being issued to 5,600 people, a process which will take several months and cost the company about €250,000.
“Ireland has stricter gift voucher rules than neighbouring jurisdictions, with a five-year minimum expiry period,” said commission chairman Brian McHugh. “This case shows why consumers need that extra time to spend gift vouchers. Customers of JD Sports lost out on almost a quarter of a million euros when their gift vouchers expired after only 12 months.”
He noted the retailer had “co-operated fully with the CCPC” and said he was “glad to be able to move quickly to resolve the issue and confirm this positive outcome for consumers”.
It is important to stress that what happened was not a deliberate attempt by JD Sports to break the law but a mistake borne out of the wrong application of it.
The cards it sold online came from the UK where the rules on vouchers are much looser than they are here. And there was a time when they were very loose here.
Despite the fact that the voucher industry in Ireland was worth hundreds of millions of euro annually, it was almost completely unregulated.
Retailers were able to impose all sorts of ridiculous and ridiculously consumer-unfriendly terms and conditions on the sale of vouchers and then hide those rules deep in the documentation and there was virtually nothing we could do about it.
Vouchers came with expiry dates of 12 months, six months, or even less than that. Shops, restaurants or airlines routinely refused to give people change – even in voucher form – if they bought something for less than the full value of the voucher.
They stopped people from using vouchers during sale periods and could refuse to accept two vouchers worth €50 each for a product or service that cost €100.
It was, in short, a mess, and everyone knew it. Tens of millions of euro were lost by Irish consumers every single year because they did not use their vouchers in time.
In 2009, the Labour Party made an attempt to bring about legislative change with the Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Bill, but it was rejected by the government of the day.
In 2015, the then minister for enterprise Richard Bruton published a draft consumer rights Bill, which contained several provisions for the regulation of vouchers, but it never became law.
And an attempt by the Social Democrats to bring another Bill before the Dáil in 2018 came to nothing.
But then, in 2019, everything changed.
The then minister for enterprise Heather Humphreys successfully got legislation over the line that imposed consumer-friendly rules on the gift voucher industry.
The Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act set a minimum expiry date of five years for vouchers and banned contract terms which required them to be spent in a single transaction. And if a consumer does not redeem the full amount of the voucher in an initial purchase, businesses are required to reimburse any remaining balance of more than €1 by way of cash, electronic transfer or voucher. The law also banned contract terms that limit the number of vouchers that could be used in a transaction.
In passing the legislation, Ireland became the first European country to enact laws protecting consumers in this area and more than six years on, we are still a long way in advance of our nearest neighbours, as the JD Sports story suggests.
There are still issues with vouchers. Some operators charge monthly administrative fees if they are not used within a certain period.
Gift vouchers also become useless if a business goes into examinership, liquidation or receivership. That means those holding vouchers are treated as an “unsecured creditor”.
But despite those issues and all the protections we now have, many Irish consumers do themselves no favours because they simply forget or fail to use vouchers when they get them.
According to research published by the CCPC last Christmas, two-thirds of those it surveyed said they had received at least one gift voucher for Christmas in 2024, but by the time Christmas 2025 had rolled around 22 per cent had yet to cash them in.
“Our research shows how popular vouchers are as gifts, but if they’re not used, they’re a waste of money,” said the CCPC director of communications Gráinne Griffin at the time.
“We are encouraging consumers to use gift vouchers as soon as possible, and if you’re thinking of giving someone a voucher this year, maybe consider if they would prefer cash – it comes with fewer terms and conditions.”
But cash is not the most thoughtful of presents and – unlike vouchers – there is always the risk that it might be frittered away or used to buy groceries or pay other bills rather than as a way to get something meaningful, which is, surely, the essence of a good present.
The one way to avoid all the issues is to spend them as quickly as possible.
If we estimate that the industry is worth €500 million a year – and that is a conservative number – and more than 20 per cent of people have not used the ones they were given for Christmas 2025, there is still well over €100 million lying around our homes.
If you do nothing else this weekend, have a look in the drawers where vouchers normally end up and if you find any spend them as soon as you can. It is the only sensible thing to do.
You can contact us at OnTheMoney@irishtimes.com with personal finance questions you would like to see us address. If you missed last week’s newsletter by Olive Keogh on the help available for elderly or vulnerable customers, you can read it here.
