Makes you wonder how many idiots bought one.

But if you return it, it would cost $65.

If you look they are out of stock at SIRIUS so I'll bet the minions at BB bought them all on the side because they have been blacklisted.

Or not!

Well lets see. A fifty dollar gift card gets you fifty dollars of goods or service. A fifty dollar gift card that you pay fifty five dollars for still will get you fifty dollars of service. Why would anyone buy such a card? It all smacks of illegalety, dishonesty, greed, an all the other words of like ilk If an espesialy dumb person or store chain wanted to rip off its patrons this is what they would do. Say, you got two twenties for a ten?

I'll be thats the price off the secret "in-store" website...

Maybe it's a collector's item?

Here's how I see it:

You go to store X and buy a gift card for store X. There's no overage or fee because you're eventually going to use that money you spent back at store X.

You go to store X and buy a gift card for store/service Y. There IS an overage or fee because X needs to profit somehow from the sale of gift card for store Y because that money you spent isn't going back into store X.

The second situation is what I'm seeing here; Best Buy is selling something people can use on Sirius, but they have to make a profit somehow so they overcharge you $55. That sucks, but the solution is to go somewhere else or wait until they're back in stock at Sirus.com or whatever.

Yeah, thats right. Sirius charges $55 for a product that BB will sell for $55. Makes perfect business sense to me!

I wonder what they charged for shipping????

I'm going to guess that they some how got it mixed up with the XM Version of the Gift Card maybe? I've seen some silly mistakes on Bestbuy.com in the past..
[www.bestbuy.com]

I wonder if it is just a mistake.

SIRIUSLY?

Wait a minute.... people still shop at anything BestBuy? Idiots.

@karmaghost: actually, gift cards are cheaper than their face value. For instance, at CompUSA we can buy $15 iTunes gift cards for $14.10. It is cool, becasue we also get discounts on things like xbox live subscriptions, WoW and EQ subscription cards, etc.

This is probably just a mistake.

@bsankr: Nicely done :D

The extra $5 obviously pays for the pleasure of dealing with BB.
Seems like a bargain.

M@AngrySicilian: Man, if I didn't shop at every store that someone said only idiots would shop -- well, I wouldn't be shopping _anywhere_.

@karmaghost: Naw... most stores sell gift cards with no "increase to make a buck." Our store sells gift cards all over, like iTunes, Chili's, Home Despot, and other places, and we sell them at face value. The store gets a cut of the card's cost, but it comes out of the base $25/50/whatever.

@fredmertz: Now that's the sort of well-reasoned suggestion that'll get you banned around these parts. Mistakes are hardly sensational, Fred! Wink.

Best Buy wants us to believe that they are selling a $50 gift card for $55 and Best Buy isn't even making money on the deal? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Well, if you need a Sirius gift card, you could find the price anywhere else, bring it in, and Best Buy will give you that "price-match-plus-10%-of-the-difference" thing, right? Or is that another electronics store?

notice it is on back order.

Worse. I picked up a pair of American Express gift cards. Gave one to bro-in-law, and had to use the other one for the neices and nephew's gifts.

But buying them, it was $25 plus a $4 handling charge at the register. The card's cover and the receipt say all of this.

Sirius sucks too, that $50 won't all go to programming. They will eat 30% of it with an activation charge, then tax you too. My sister got it for xmas (shes blind so this was a pretty cool gift) and I had to bite my tongue while activating it.

STOP THE MERGER!

@blitzcat: XM's activation fee is $15, Sirius' is $10 if you activate on the web and $15 by phone. In my state, Sirius either doesn't charge tax or it is already built into the price. I've had Sirius since 2003, and aside from the fact that they fuck up my rebilling EVERY year, I've loved the service. I do end up getting a $30 credit every year because of the rebilling issues, though, so I'm not complaining!

Someone needs to poke Siruis and inform them of this screwup by bestbuy.

Here's what I think.
I think that the face value of the card - $50 - is what you get after a mandatory "activation fee" (don't get me started) is paid. Some (most?) cards bury the activation fee in the use of the card, but I suspect that soon a $50 card will cost $55 because various local laws will crop up to require a card marked $50 to, you know, be worth $50 when you first use it.

@DanKelley98: Beaten to it!

@Nighthawke: They'll probably tell you that, like just about all other goods, the retailer sets the price.

@Mr_Human: I hear ya.

paying for radio. haaaa haaa!

@mammalpants: You pay for "free" over-the-air radio, too. You pay in time, listening to commercials.

Someone please explain to me how I still get Sirius for free? I shut service off years ago and have a first-generation clunky antenna/receiver setup in my car. I called them to tell them that my service was not off and they just said that I am not a customer.

There is no sales tax on Sirius subscriptions except in states where they have a brick and mortar presence.That would be new York. Retailers don't set higher prices for gift cards. That is absurd.Cards like American Express and Visa have a fee when you buy them.They are essentially pre-loaded credit cards which can be used anywhere.

@SaveMeJeebus: Same!
It is actually kind of awesome though. I get full programming for free.

At the little Mac store I work at we don't sell iTunes gift cards because we can't get them at a discounted cost, so we would end up having to charge the customer more for the card such as BB is doing here. But that's exactly why we DON'T sell them at our store. You can pretty much get those things at any 7/11, grocery store or Barnes and Noble anyway.

@Mr_Human: Granted... but come on, BestBuy? People who shop there _deserve_ to shop there, if you know what I mean.

@karmaghost: I can go to Safeway (substitute with Kroger, Giant Eagle, or some other grocery chain) and buy 10, 20, 25, and 50 dollar gift cards to about 50 different stores (including safeway).

They all cost the value of the card, nothing more.

@coren (and others): I've seen many gift cards that you buy for face value at one store that are for use at another. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the store that sells the gift card to you is profiting from the transaction in some way. They're not providing you the no-fee $50 card to Red Lobster because they're nice people. I think that in the case of the Best Buy/Sirius card, while it is possible that it's a mistake, I'm thinking that the profit element of the whole deal is just more transparent than with other gift cards.

Ummm... really? Did nobody stop to think that it's a TYPO?! I work at BB and find errors on the Web site every day. There are millions of items and mistakes happen. The $30 Sirius card is $30, same for the $49.99
I realize that there are lots of angry former customers out there, but be honest with yourselves.

C'mon, you guys are smarter than this. A 50-dollar gift card does not cost the retailer 50 dollars at any point. Quick and dirty illustration:

Maybe their estimated cost is fifteen dollars of merchandise and ten dollars of overhead (including the costs of dealing with the card), say 25 dollars total. They sell the card to a reseller at a price point of, for example, 40 dollars. Immediate profit. Then the reseller sells the card for 50 dollars. 10 more dollars profit go to the reseller. Then the card recipient goes to the retailer and buys the 15 WHOLESALE dollars worth of merchandise for 50 RETAIL dollars.

Bottom line, Best Buy didn't pay 55 dollars for the Sirius card, or even 50 dollars. It doesn't work like that.

@blitzcat: Big deal....the activation fee is only 10 bucks last time I checked. And it's very much worth it. And I don't pay any taxes. Each month, my Visa is charged for $12.95, the cost of monthly service. After having it for a few years, I wouldn't own a car without Sirius. Even though my new car has a 6 disc MP3 CD changer and iPod adapter (meaning it can hold a fuckton of my music) I still listen to Sirius because the selection just can't be beat.

I just clicked the link and it claims the card is backordered. Maybe there are enough idiots out there looking to pay too much for this gift card. Someone should also check this on the website in the store. It might be $65 there.

@xtc46:
And that is why Compusa is going out of business. Great business model there.

Some random best buy person would not know how much sirius charges best buy for the cards.

Actually im pretty sure it works the other way. Cards are free for the store, most often the company pays the store a small fee to sell them. When they are rung up they connect to a server seperate from the store that is run by another company (like Sirius) which then credits best buy for the sale and ads value to the card.

LOL! Some of the comments are great! I love reading what people have to say about these "businesses".

@SaveMeJeebus: @Mr.Purple:

Here's how that happens: when you ask for your service to be turned off, they send a deactivation signal via the satellite to your radio to have it turn off all the channels (except the preview channel 184). If you turned off the power to your radio prior to this signal being sent, and you don't turn it back on for some time, it will never receive the disconnect signal and will continue to work, even though you are no longer in Sirius' billing system. Eventually, Sirius' system will assume the disconnect request has been successfully received and they will stop sending it. I have a radio in this state myself, and use it at work :-)

@speedwell: Retailers who sell other company's gift cards make virtually nothing -- maybe a couple of percent, which on a $50 card would be about a buck. The stores that do it, do it for convenience (i.e. mostly drugstores and supermarkets) and to drive traffic. Also, it is very rare that a retailer has a merchandise cost of $15 on $50. 70% gross margins are the exclusive territory of software companies, service companies and the occasional high-priced retailer that sells their own goods like Coach, for example.

...and if you bought the $50 gift card for $55, give me a call, I have some real estate i'd like to sell you.