you give an employee a $50 gift certificate to a favorite restaurant for a job well done, that’s more valuable than $50 cash. …

If you give an employee some lousy antique looking clock for decades of service, he will proudly display it on his mantel and tell this grandkids.

How do you know the wife would like that particular restaurant? Unless the certificate is to all restaurants of a particular group, like Darden, in which case 90% of the restaurants that accept it will be crap. Gimme the cash or shut your yappa.

The clock? “I slaved for those idiots for 30 years and they fired me two weeks before I was eligible for a pension. I’d like to shove that clock up my old boss’s bum.”