How Long Do You Have to Use a Gift Card? Don't Wait for the Email. Joann Never Sent One
Four clothing-and-crafts chains went into liquidation in the last nineteen months holding somebody's birthday money. I lined up the court dates and the last-day-for-gift-cards dates to see how much warning each one actually printed. The clocks don't match, and none of them started where you'd look.
· · Updated August 29, 2026 
On a slow midafternoon this past February, at the register of the Eddie Bauer outlet in Blackwood, New Jersey, a store employee gave a local reporter the clearest consumer disclosure this whole subject would ever get. “March 12 is the last day for gift cards,” she said. “After that they will not take them.” Suzette Parmley printed the quote in the Sun on February 27. The deadline itself lived in bankruptcy filings, eighteen days old by then. The clerk knew before you did.
That’s the whole genre now. A chain dies, your card starts expiring, and the date is set at a courthouse while the store’s homepage is still selling serenity. We don’t hold a card from any chain in this piece, so this is a desk read: four liquidations from the last nineteen months, one number pulled from each. How long did the paper in the drawer stay money?
| Chain | Filed | Last day for cards | The math |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joann | January 2025 | Feb. 28, 2025 | 4 days after the everything-closes announcement |
| Forever 21 | March 16, 2025 | April 15, 2025 | 30 days after the petition, to the day |
| Saks Off 5th | January 2026 | rolling, store by store | 15 days into each closing sale |
| Eddie Bauer | Feb. 9, 2026 | March 12, 2026 | 31 days after the petition, stores only |
How long do you have to use a gift card when a store closes?
Across the Joann, Forever 21, Saks Global and Eddie Bauer liquidations of 2025 and 2026, the printed gift card window ran 15 to 31 days, and every clock was anchored to a court event, not to the announcement you actually saw. Forever 21’s motion is the tidiest specimen: the company asked the Delaware court to honor cards “through April 15, 2025, which is thirty days after the Petition Date,” and its customer notice repeats the date without the reasoning. Eddie Bauer’s stores got 31 days, in person only. Its website kept trading because the e-commerce side belongs to a separate company and never entered Chapter 11, which produced the strange spring of 2026 where eddiebauer.com was alive and your card was dying in the mall. And the Saks order, the one we read in August, skipped the petition anchor entirely: 15 days from the start of each store’s liquidation sale, a rolling deadline nobody could put on one calendar.
Why did Joann gift cards stop working so fast?
Joann shoppers got four calendar days: the company announced on Monday, February 24, 2025 that all of its roughly 800 stores would close, and that Friday the 28th was the last day its registers took gift cards. The notice sat on an FAQ page. Customers told WRAL no email ever came, and one North Carolina woman watched a $75 Christmas card get refused at the counter, in a line with other people holding the same dead plastic. Joann’s stated reason: it “didn’t have that permission from the court” to keep accepting them once the liquidator, which never issued the cards, took over the sales.
One wrinkle worth knowing. Maine’s I-Team pointed out that under state law, gift cards there can’t expire at all, and told holders to complain to the attorney general if a register refused them. The Saks order answered that argument a year later with a clause applying its no-cash rule “notwithstanding any policy or state law to the contrary.” Your state’s protection is real. It’s also exactly the thing a sale order can be drafted to step over.
The counterexample is Claire’s, and it’s the cheerful one. The accessories chain filed in August 2025, headlines promised hundreds of closures, and then a buyer showed up: closures shrank to 291 stores and the brand kept operating. We found no printed gift card cutoff for Claire’s, and that absence is the tell. No liquidation, no countdown. The Eddie Bauer filings even planned for this fork, promising an update within 30 days on whether a buyer would appear. None did, and the last stores went dark on April 30.
So the drill, if a chain you’re holding starts making headlines: assume roughly a month from the filing, not from whenever you happen to hear. Check the case website for the notice, spend the card on anything, and don’t wait for the brand to write to you. Joann never did. A clerk in Blackwood, working a dying register on a slow afternoon, gave better notice than the entire docket managed to mail. Come by March 12.