Though the high street record store went bust on Christmas Eve, it is still trading. But those holding vouchers are creditors, not customers.

That leaves young people who received vouchers as gifts holding worthless pieces of plastic.

Three junior leaders at a youth club on the Saltersgill estate in Middlesbrough were given vouchers as a thank-you for their work during the year. Two successfully exchanged theirs before Christmas. The third tried earlier this week and got the brush off, as the local Evening Gazette reported.

The lesson? Most likely, if you have a voucher, get it spent fast. Holding onto it is a high risk strategy in a world of disappearing retail outlets.

The other financial lesson is in following what happens when a company goes bust.

Zavvi is advising holders of gift cards or gift vouchers to write to the administrators. Those with vouchers dated after 27th November 2008 can expect a  full refund. That’s because of a trust that the directors set up when they realised the store was in trouble. Others will have to take their place in the queue of unsecured creditors. They can hope for a lower payment, if any, once assets have been sold and legal processes completed.

All voucher holders are being requested to send their vouchers, quoting the numbers and giving their full name and address, to the administrators:

Zavvi vouchers
c/o The Joint Administrators
Ernst & Young LLP
100 Barbirolli Square
Manchester
M2 3EY

Details on the Zavvi website – click on important customer message, top right.

No. 

Are young people quick to adopt internet and phone banking? 

Not so you’d notice.

This, and more, is according to a fascinating set of profiles of spending, broken down into age groups and sex. Taken from a major bit of market research known as the Consumer Payments Survey, they have just been made available by APACS, the trade body for banks, building societies and card issuers. 

After the jump there’s a breakdown of some key findings about young men and women aged 16 to 24. Useful for discussion starters, and for rethinking some easy stereotypes.

Young men aged 16 to 24 have fewer plastic cards than any other group. They spend around £22 a year in shoe shops. Only 54 per cent say they check their bank statements for unfamiliar transactions. 

Young men spend less than women the same age on gadgets in electrical retailers. Their money goes on eating out. They spend an average of £389 per year on restaurants, cafes and snack bars, compared to just £211 spent by women the same age.

They are not particularly internet savvy. Just 40 per cent use internet or phone banking, which is nine per cent below the national average.

Each year young men withdraw an average of £2,821 in cash, through 86 cash machine visits

Young women aged 16 to 24 have on average 2.4 plastic cards. This is the only age group where women have more plastic to flash than men the same age – who have an average of just 1.7 cards.

On average, women aged 16-24 each spend £82 a year in shoe shops, nearly four times as much as young men. They are almost as unlikely as young men to spend time checking their bank statements – with just 55 per cent saying they do. 

Just 34 per cent say they use internet or telephone banking. But when they move into the next age group, 25 to 34, that figure soars dramatically to 77 per cent, the highest of any group.

Each year young women withdraw £2,625 in cash, through 70 cash machine visits.

All the profile summaries can be downloaded from the APACS media centre.

The theme of her latest column is irrationality. She looks at the odd realities of our attitudes to money and raises such questions as…

• Is paying with cash more “real” – and painful – than other ways of spending?
• Would you miss a tube train to pick up a 5p piece you dropped?
• When you see a price tag of £9.99 does your heart round it down to £9, ignoring your head’s awareness that it is really £10?
• Do you recognise the “in for a penny in for a pound” syndrome? As Kellaway puts it, “If I’ve already bought an expensive jacket, I might as well follow it up with some expensive shoes and trousers in the same afternoon.”
• Are you a sucker for money-off deals for stuff you don’t really want?
• Have you ever spent the same chunk of money more than once?

There’s a key message for educators in this. Anyone hoping to get young people to stop making spending decisions that don’t stack up logically is doomed to failure.

Lucy Kellaway is very expensively educated. She has A-level maths and a degree in economics. She’s worked for twenty years as a Financial Times journalist. She knows vastly more about how money works than most of us can dream of. She knows that her irrational attitude to money is shameful.

Bearing all that in mind, young people who make daft spending choices mustn’t write themselves off as hopeless or helpless. They perhaps just need to learn to get used to it happening, and some help in damage limitation.