by Kade Agan
With both Black Friday and annual Buy Nothing Day safely a week behind us, now would be a good time to evaluate how each of us wants to approach the holiday season. The dust has settled and maybe you’ve got an early start on a pile of gifts for family and friends, or instead have decided to sit the gift-giving out this year. There may be a middle road that allows for holiday spirit without an excess of overconsumption.
Joel Waldfogel suggests in his new book, Scroogenomics, that people are in a habit of spending heaps of cash each year on unsentimental, unwanted gifts out of a sense of cultural expectation that others will be disappointed if they don’t receive these items. Waldford estimates that Americans alone spend $70billion in total each year on Christmas gifts that no one really wants, ranging from baggy sweaters to useless knickknacks. While he doesn’t propose that people cease giving gifts altogether, he does think people should consider giving gifts that people will really value – namely money or a gift card. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Waldford explains:
"Cash is in general a stigmatized gift. Psychologists have studied this. It would be very awkward for me to give cash to a social peer. It is OK to give cash to a child or a grandchild or a niece or nephew. So we do see a lot of cash giving in those groups. And what we’ve seen in the past fifteen years is astronomical growth of gift cards, which are cash without the stigma. You the recipient get to choose what you want. They appear on the lists of most desired gifts. I don’t have to tell people that they should give cash instead. Just look at the data. Probably on the order of a third of holiday gift giving is now in the form of gift cards. It does look like a response to a concern about destroying value.”
The giving of a gift card or money then allows the recipient to use this gift however he or she sees fit, thereby lessening the amount of unnecessary consumption that could ultimately end up in landfills in the future. Waldford takes things a step further by mentioning a good card, the gift card’s benevolent brother. This card can be loaded up with cash, given as a gift and then redeemed by a charity of the cardholder’s choice.
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