The article does however support the view that although the businesses should be able to profit from people not redeeming their gift cards, there should be measures in place to ensure that businesses are not allowed to abuse the system. This is in contrast to liberalism, the other paradigm which focuses on the business perspective, as there is no model proposed to monitor the capitalism. The article instead appears to be fully in favor of capitalism, as there is no negative view given as to the benefits which companies may gain from the situation.

Critical Analysis

The article is well-written overall. The article accurately reports the findings of the study which are the focus of the article. The study provides empirical evidence for the observations which are detailed in the article. There are not only the statistics reported in the article, but also a thorough explanation of what the results mean. There are also details from the study which attempt to explain the reasons behind the findings. For example the main reasons which were identified for lack of gift card redemption have been included in the article.

The article also considers both perspectives...

The article could have taken the results of the study and pursued the article from the perspective of the consumer. Instead, the results were presented in a subjective manner. The opinions of several industry workers were also included in the study to enable their perspective to be considered. The main criticism of the businesses which were consulted was that although they spoke to industry leaders such as Wal-Mart there is no guarantee that the same would be true of other smaller businesses. There was also no empirical evidence given by the businesses to refute the claims that they are benefiting from the situation. The businesses which were consulted may have responded in the way they did so as to reduce the appearance of possible abuse in the system. For example if the businesses were to have admitted to the reporter that their business was one which had a large number of unused gift cards every year this may have led to questions over how they were addressing the situation.
Therefore, although the article is written very well over all, the reactions of the businesses which were presented should be treated with caution due to the lack of evidence to support their claims.