Here’s something fun my wife and I came up with. You know that pile of unused gift cards stacked up in your junk drawer?

Grab the cards up and make it a date. Buzz around town using them even if each one is a departure from the previous one. It’s fun because the date is “free” and you don’t know quite how it will go. Our date idea was pretty last minute, and we had limited time, but we still had a blast.

First, we went to Lion’s Tap, Minnesota’s best burger place (full disclosure: I worked there in high school). I brought along an old gift card I found in the junk drawer and asked our server if there was any money on it. She ran the card through their system and noted it had $10 on it. She printed off a receipt showing me the $10 balance, and I noticed the something on the printout. The gift card was from 2010. I had this lunch for free with an eight year-old gift card:

Next, we went off to use a movie theater gift card. The gift card had $30 on it from my wife’s birthday. We watched the new movie Hostiles. We both liked the movie and the gift card covered the whole cost with some leftovers (we sneaked in our own popcorn).

Next we went to Target to use a Target gift card and but meat for upcoming dinner. We didn’t like any of the meat, so we went to the infant area. We decided to save the gift card for when we really need it, but my wife did give me a 40 minute course on all things baby.

Finally, my wife had $30 to spend at a makeup store, but we ran out of time so . . . we’ll have to have another “gift card date” soon. And by the look of my stack of gift cards, we should probably start to like Dominos pizza a lot.

Seriously, though, this site I found says that roughly 8-10% of gift cards go unused. Back in 2006, Best Buy apparently made $43 million because consumers failed to redeem their gift cards. Another site claims there’s $1 billion in unused gift cards every year. While that works out to be only about $3 per American per year, if you’re anything like me, your unused gift cards are worth waaay more than $3.

So don’t let these companies benefit because you can’t get your act together. Grab your wife or girlfriend and get out there on a date someone else paid for already (even if it was eight birthdays ago). Who knows, you may end up buying meat at Target, seeing a great Western movie, and eating two bacon cheeseburgers. Or maybe playing skeeball at an old arcade you went to with some free ice cream in your hand.