I may or may not work at the store indicated by Out of my Element's profile location. (In case anyone else in my store visits this forum)

To answer northwestbound's question, no and no.

Gift Card Mall (Blackhawk Network) sends us worthless unactivated plastic cards at no cost. They even send in a person to hang them up on the rack. When customers purchase gift cards, they pay for the value of the card (or whatever they specify for open value cards) plus any fees. The store collects the money and is billed by Blackhawk for the value of the activated gift cards minus a small (in the neighborhood of 1% or slightly more, depending on the card, 0% if it's the store's own gift card) commission. The POS system at this particular chain codes it as a general purchase, so I've been racking up the credit card points whenever I have any planned purchases; for example, Amazon.