Inside a dim office secured by a sensor lock, eight young men in yarmulkes sit before computer screens sifting through tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gift cards. Toiling under a latticed ceiling, the workers some in their late teens field orders to buy pre-owned cards online, fetching each meticulously catalogued item from the company’s man-size vault, where at least $3 million worth wait for new owners at any given time.
Once assembled, orders are carried to a shipping and receiving room beneath the vault chamber, where another group of skullcapped employees mails them out. Newly acquired gift cards are scanned to check their value, catalogued and bar-coded for easy search. “You’ve got to find that exact card, and you’ve got to find it quickly,” says Elliot Bohm, CEO and co-founder of CardCash.com , a company in Lakewood, N.J. that grossed $56 million last year buying and reselling the gift cards that nobody wanted.
Dispatches From The Front 