Oh, maybe the real use for gift cards is that the receiver can't haggle. "I know you wanted to give me $200, but how about we make that an even $500 instead?" :)
To clarify about the cashlessness of Sweden: cash still exists, and you can still get government printed bills, but many places have stopped accepting them, and these days whenever someone has non-foreign cash it becomes the topic of discussion: "why the hell do you have those?"
Honestly I don't know that they're useful for anything except donating to homeless(and even they usually have swish these days) or buying illegal drugs
I've never had one, though, so I don't know the specifics.
Apparently, BNP Paribas (one of the major local banks) now has a "teen offer", for people 12-17 yo. This seems to still be attached to the parents' account with the same bank, but the kids get to "manage" the account.
Card payments are not gift cards.
(The exception is if there's some other social expectation that specifically says that the gift should be cash, like Jewish wedding gifts).
It kind of explains why weddings in Israel are so expensive, I heard it's almost cheaper to buy flight tickets to buy wedding dress in another country.
Not only, it is normal also in Poland (though it is normal that people give both physical gift and cash).
Traditionally, people often registered somewhere like a department store or a kitchen goods store. Some of the function of gifts was historically to get a young couple moving out of their parents' houses a start. Of course, these days a lot of people are pretty well set-up before they get married.
That's tricky though. Often enough, people really don't know or think enough to match properly, which causes the gift to end up being offloaded somewhere else later, and/or breeds silent resentment.
It's not just when people don't know what the recipient is interested in, but importantly, when they think they know, but don't understand that you shouldn't buy something related to someone's interest/hobby if you yourself aren't comparably proficient in it.
> Cash is not specifically matched to its recipient.
In some sense, it's maximally matched to every recipient, by virtue of being universal. Question is, is the gift supposed to be about recipient, or about the gift-giver? Super specific gifts are often about the latter.