Of course it’s difficult – or nigh to impossible – to always hit the right note with Christmas presents, but if you know a person well and give some serious thought to what he or she would like, then you will probably get it right.
Now ever since eBay etc, there has been a market to swap and sell unneeded or unwanted gifts, and even I have sold my son’s toys on eBay when he was smaller and received the same computer game from his parents, aunts and uncles alike (which shows one of the drawbacks if you tell everyone what you would really like to get under the tree).
So it is quite surprising that on eBay there are now whole job lots of unwanted Christmas gifts for sale – some even still wrapped. This really makes me wonder what happened to these gifts, why they were not even opened: Are they a testimony to a recently broken down relationship? Or has the recipient passed away?
Or is it simply a matter of ‚the thought does NOT count‘ and the British have turned into the most ungrateful lot?
eBay and YouGov did a survey in 2014 on unwanted Christmas gifts un Great Britain and estimated that £1.7 billion were wasted. But not all of the U.K. is equally bad at choosing gifts, with the north of England and London doing quite badly and Northern Ireland doing relatively well.
Across the pond it doesn‘t look any better: Fortune magazine stated in an article at the beginning of 2019 that 34% of Americans planned to return gifts they had received at Christmas.
So no doubt millions of Pounds, Dollars , Euros etc. worth of unwanted presents have already and will shortly find their way onto eBay and all the other exchange platforms.
More than two decades ago, the American economist Joel Waldfogel penned a paper on the deadweight loss of Christmas, demonstrating that recipients of gifts value them less than what they have actually cost and making a strong case for gift cards and gift vouchers. Not very original, I agree, but unless you know a person very well certainly the best choice – at least from an economist’s perspective.
The grumpy older man 