the christmas scam

i never really got the christmas thing when i was growing up. for one thing, my family wasn’t the type to exchange presents, however non-denominational they might seem. accordingly, i’ve also never bought my dad a tie or a pair of socks, which makes me decidedly uncommon - or so popular culture would have me believe.

there are plenty of people who will argue extensively that rampant gift giving has nothing to do with the true ideals espoused by jesus, but i don’t want to talk about that because i believe that there’s nothing wrong with designated days to show our gratitude and love to our family and friends; even the best of us needs a reminder from time to time. but what really boggles my mind about christmas is learning how bad we are at gift giving, and the associated economic and social waste that results.

yesterday i stumbled on this year-old article from the new yorker. in it, the author discusses something called ‘the deadweight loss of christmas’:

A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. [the study] estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss, which means that billions of dollars a year is now going to waste.

ok, but it’s the thought that counts, right? well, not so fast:

according to a survey by the National Retail Federation, forty per cent of America expects to return at least one holiday gift this year, and an American Express survey found that roughly a third of respondents had “re-gifted” presents.

so we’re out there spending all this time earning money to buy gifts, then spending all of our saturdays and sundays from thanskgiving until christmas eve considering, planning, shopping for, and eventually purchasing gifts, and the result is that we’re overpaying for gifts that people don’t actually want.

weird.

this has led, of course, to the boon in gift cards. while it’s apparently unacceptable to give money as a gift - a thought that never occurred to either jewish grandmothers or italian relatives of relatives - we’ve become socialized to the idea that exchanging stored value on gift cards somehow falls into the ‘gift’ camp instead of the ‘cash’ camp.

that’s probably because cash is an order of magnitude more valuable than a gift card. gift cards make us arbitrarily deciding which stores the receiver should shop at: a bookstore gift card, for example, doesn’t do any good for anyone with a library membership (and if you don’t have a library membership and live in a major city AND still buy books for full price from a big box bookstore, i have a simple question: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?). gift cards also represent a fundamental mismanagement of our money: we’re forgoing any interest we could be earning on the cash and giving an interest free loan to the store of choice, some of whom actually have the audacity to charge us for the service of lending them our money for free! and then, of course, there is the issue of upselling: because nothing ever comes to $50 exactly, when you give a gift card you’re generally obligating your recipient to spend more money to ‘unlock’ your gift.

but the worst part of giving a gift card is that, according to a reference in this article, 19% of people who receive one never use it. even if the card gets used, it rarely gets used completely; how exactly do you spend the leftover $4.72 in a clothing store? what’s worse, according to research referenced in the same article, 10% of stored-value on gift cards never gets redeemed, which, in the us, amounted to $8 billion dollars in 2006! i will emphasize that again: consumers in 2006 gave $8 billion dollars worth of real, hard-earned, after-tax money in gifts that effectively disappeared. actually, that’s not true: the $8 billion dollars was actually transferred to the shareholders of major retailers: a great modern day example of the rich profiting on the stupidity of the consuming class.

there is another pertinent point here: according to the storyofstuff.com, a mindboggling 99% of stuff isn’t being used a mere 6 months after it’s purchased. all of that stuff creates waste: either as a part of the manufacturing, transportation, packaging, or retailing processes; when the stuff actually becomes waste once you decide that you want faster, newer, prettier, more in fashion other stuff; or through the resulting environmental degradation, poverty, or war in the third world countries where the stuff actually comes from. (for example, did you know that 80% of the world’s reserves of coltan, an essential resource used in cellphones, computers, video game consoles, and other consumer electronics, is found in the not-so-democratic republic of congo where, incidentally, almost 4 million people have died in a horrible conflict over the past decade? if you didn’t, you should, but apparently these celebrities don’t.)

so, to summarize, in our mad rush to find ‘the perfect gift’, it turns out that we’re ignoring the fact that we’re doing a really shitty job. we are ‘wasting’ our hard-earned money by overspending on gifts that our recipients don’t want, we are wasting (without the air quotes) our hard-earned money by spending on gift cards that don’t actually get used, and we are wasting our fading relationship with other societies and our exceptionally fragile environment. forget thinking about what jesus would do: isn’t it time for us to take a hard look in the mirror and think about what we should do?

a conclusion, from the original new yorker article:

if most of the presents we buy are going to be less valuable in monetary terms than in sentimental ones, then there’s no reason to believe that the more expensive gift is a better gift. In fact, the more we spend at Christmas, the more we waste. We might actually be happier—and we’d certainly be wealthier—if we exchanged small, well-considered gifts rather than haunting the malls. Calculating the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts is a coldhearted project, but it leads to a paradoxically warmhearted conclusion: the fact of giving may be more important than what you give. Start with “Bah, humbug” and you somehow end up with “God bless us, every one.”

make this the christmas where we give handmade, thoughtful gifts that come from the heart. share happiness and joy and love and stories and ideas and experiences and memories and dreams. share by donating to a great cause in a loved one’s name. share a favourite book or a favourite piece of clothing. share a hug. or a kiss. or a brisk mid-winter walk in an inner city park.

why not make this the christmas when we finally learn to say no?