Jennifer Lin has a pitch she likes to repeat, and it usually gets a laugh: think of it as the antidote to the Amazon gift card.
Lin runs the Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce, and this spring she helped launch a community-wide gift card built around a simple idea. Instead of a card that sends money to a warehouse somewhere, this one keeps it on Los Gatos’ own sidewalks.
“It’s spending in support of our local businesses,” Lin said in an interview Thursday.
The card launched in May, timed for a stretch of the calendar when gift-giving spikes: end of the school year (think teacher gifts etc.) and Father’s Day. Thirty businesses signed on for the launch. That number has already climbed to 34 and is still growing.
Joining costs nothing. Merchants opt in, and the Chamber handles the rest.
“It’s really just an option to support local,” Lin said.
The Chamber CEO sees it filling a familiar list of needs: employee appreciation, client gifts, the kind of last-minute presents that used to mean a trip to a big-box store, or a series of clicks on a shopping app.
The card runs on a platform called Yiftee, which Lin describes as a nationally recognized system already working in neighboring cities, including Mountain View and downtown San Jose.
Shoppers buy the card online and load it straight into a digital wallet—no plastic required.
Lin didn’t stumble onto Yiftee on her own. She heard about it through the Silicon Valley Chamber Coalition, a group of 14 independent chambers across the region that meets every other month to trade ideas.
“Together our voices are stronger,” Lin said of the coalition. “That is where we come together and are truly able to represent our region.”
The gift card had already proven itself in other communities before it reached Los Gatos, and that track record made the pitch an easier one.
“Businesses see the value of this program,” Lin said. Growth won’t happen overnight, she added, but the early sign-up numbers suggest merchants are willing to give it time.
For a small town built on foot traffic and familiar faces, that may be the whole point: a gift card that asks shoppers to spend the same way they already do, right there on Main Street.
*This article was written with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude as an experiment.
