Nearly all of us fight the battle against clutter, and allowing clutter to reign can cost you financial in a number of ways. The most common one that comes to mind is paying bills late and being slapped with fees because the bill got buried underneath some pile on your desk.
Here is an unusual real-life example of clutter costing money. My wife’s great aunts, both in their eighties, share a house that had become an enormous mountain of clutter. Well unfortunately one of the great aunts fell and broke her hip, and to allow her to be able to move around at home with medical equipment and such the house needed to be decluttered. The Louisiana family spent over a week helping to get the house in condition, sorting through mounds of old clothing, mail, and other items.
They found a lot of interesting things in this decluttering exercise, perhaps the most frustrating of which was a $60 paper gift certificate to Maison Blanche department stores. It was piled amongst some books and other gifts that they had received many Christmas seasons ago, still in the gold gift envelope. Never heard of Maison Blanche? There is a good reason for that: it was bought out in the early 1990s by Dillards and has operated under the Dillards name ever since.
I have sent an email to Dillards customer service to see if they can in some way honor the certificate or exchange it for a Dillards gift card:
To whom it may concern:
As long as Dillard’s Department Stores have been in business and knowing the many other department stores that have been acquired and added into the Dillard’s family of stores, I am hopeful you can appreciate this story and assist with our request.
As you are probably aware, Dillard’s has purchased a number of department stores with locations in south Louisiana over the years, including Maison Blanche stores in the early 1990s. Considering how long it has been since that acquisition, imagine our surprise when we recently came across a gift
certificate to Maison Blanche!While helping to declutter our great aunt’s home after her recent hip surgery, we found an unused $60 gift certificate buried amongst books and other items she had received as Christmas gifts that year. Obviously there are no longer any Maison Blanche stores at which to redeem the certificate, and in the age of gift cards we would likely receive very odd looks trying to redeem a paper certificate in a Dillard’s store. However, as the certificate bears no expiration date we would like to be able to redeem the certificate or have a gift card issued in its place. Please advise as to how we can redeem this very old certificate.
Sincerely,
BillyOceansEleven
Unfortunately my email received only a standard “we will forward it to the proper executive for handling” response, and after two weeks we haven’t heard anything else so I am assuming the certificate is ultimately worthless (thanks for all the help there, Dillards!). So there is a real-life, albeit unusual, example of how clutter can cost you money.
