Why We are Bad at Gifting and How to Fix It
We all know this scenario. It’s your birthday and you receive Grandma’s gift in the mail. You’ve come to expect year after year that it’s never going to be quite your taste. You open the package, only to find that that it is unsurprisingly another pair of pajamas that are just not your style. Into the donation pile they go.
Pause. Why have we come to expect receiving gifts we don’t want from the people closest to us? And more importantly why are we turning around and giving the same type of bad gifts in return?
Bad gifting is more prevalent today than ever. Maybe it’s because in general we as human beings love to rush and don’t take the time to put thought into the gift giving process. Maybe we look too much to influencers and others to tell us what the people in our lives want, or at least what they SHOULD want. Maybe we just give up too easily and look to the gift card route? The possibilities are endless.
However, this isn’t just a modern day problem. If you look back, you’ll see that history is sprinkled with hundreds of examples of bad gift giving. Think, the three wise men approach the manger where baby Jesus lay. They come bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh…...I know there is higher meaning to this, but realistically not the best gifts for a baby. See what I mean?
But don’t lose hope for gifting. For every bad example there are a handful of good one’s that give you all the feels. A few of my personal favorites:
Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio sent six long stemmed red roses to Marilyn Monroe’s grave every year for 20 years after her death.
Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan dearly loved his wife Mumtaz Mahal. Heartbroken after she died in 1631 while giving birth to their 14th child, he commissioned 20,000 workers to build the Taj Mahal as a monument to her memory.
A universal symbol of freedom and democracy, the Statue of Liberty was a given as a gift of friendship to the United States in 1884 from France.
What makes the difference between good gifting and bad gifting is simple: thoughtfulness. Notice how each example of great gifting involves the giving of a gift that was personal, or unique to the relationship between the giver and the recipient.
Moving Forward
Today, over $284 billion dollars of purchased items are returned every year. There’s no telling what percentage of this is solely returned gifts, but I can imagine it’s a relatively large portion. How do we change this? We start from square one, we actually give good gifts.
How to Give Good Gifts
Think about the person you are buying for and treat them separate from the masses.
Just because slippers and bathrobes are popular gifts to give, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be right for your recipient. Your gift shouldn’t be for everyone, it should be individualized and personal for the one person you are giving it to. Channel their likes, dislikes, weird obsessions, guilty pleasures, inside jokes you have with one another and work from there.
Don’t wait until the last minute
Bad gifting is almost always the result of rushed gift shopping. You waited until the last minute, maybe even until the day of, to find that perfect something. The reality is with the time crunch combined with the pressure to find something that doesn’t make it look like you waited until the last minute to think about it, it is highly unlikely you are going to find that thing that is personal and pops. Give yourself a week or more to think about the person you’re buying for, that way you can have the time to truly search and find something unique and thoughtful.
Think beyond the walls of a store.
You’ve heard this a thousand times before, sometimes the best gifts can’t be bought in a store. Maybe it’s a special dessert you make that they are obsessed with, or a service you can provide them (like cleaning their tub, or fixing a broken appliance), or maybe it’s taking care of a task that you know they’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t been able to. There are no price tags on these types of gifts, yet they always end up being the most valuable.
Don’t over do it
We have the tendency to think, for most things, that bigger is better. This isn’t always the case when it comes to gifting. If you want to give good gifts, know that the size, value, and perception of the gift to others don’t matter. What do I mean by perception? Just because you’ve wrapped it in ornate paper, and topped it with fancy golden bows doesn’t mean it is any better of a gift. On the topic of value, you may know that your recipient wants a new everyday tote bag, but that doesn’t mean you can have to buy a $1,000 designer bag to ensure it’s a good gift. There’s a point where spending too much, even if you put a lot of thought into the gift, looks like you are trying too hard. You don’t want to make them feel guilty for receiving your gift. Be especially mindful of this.
Bad gifting sucks, but the good news is that it is completely avoidable. That’s where Gyftful comes into play.
The mission of Gyftful is not only to provide carefully curated gift ideas, but also to inspire you to further think about and find the perfect gift for the person you are buying for.
What we suggest might not be a hole-in-one for you every time, but what we do hope is that it will challenge the old way of shopping for gifts and work to bring thoughtfulness back into the process. Welcome to Gyftful. Let’s #endbadgifting together.