Gift Cards: A Booming Niche in the Marketplace

Magnetic stripes have a quality called coersivity, which reflects their ability to maintain their data integrity despite frequent or rough use. For the average gift card, which Jacobs says is swiped 2.5 times, low coersivity is fine. But for a card expected to go through a large number of transactions — or a critical application like security ID cards — “high co” is called for.