Gifts are personal. Gift guides are not.
Perhaps this holiday-gifting season, you’re wondering: What do I get for my dad?
It’s a difficult question, to be sure. But if you consult a holiday gift guide, the query shifts. What do you get for a dad? Then the answer becomes as clear as an oversize whisky ice cube: a book about an old president, something for golf or the grill, or—oh, a steak subscription! Your own dad’s personal taste might not be accounted for, but the deed will be done.
There are many understandable reasons for being bereft of gift ideas. Perhaps you’re a loving friend and family member but you’ve just never had a talent for gifting. Maybe you have a dozen people to buy for and not nearly enough time. Possibly you need to find something for your third nephew who’s visiting, and, frankly, you don’t know anything about him. In any of these scenarios, recommendation lists can be tempting. They’re also massively popular; plenty of people want to outsource the labor of product research and feel comforted by the support of an expert in whatever they end up choosing. Unfortunately, the gift-guide industrial complex is likely to lead you astray.
Read: Gift giving is about the buyer, not the receiver
The crux of good gift giving is to find something personally meaningful to your recipient. Gift guides, however, need to appeal to a wide range of consumers. So they tend to dish out their recommendations with a heavy reliance on gender and family-role stereotypes. Moms, home-based and in need of relaxation, want slippers and tea. Brothers, tech-savvy and in need of fashion help, want some sort of gadget and a nice sweater. But if the people in your life don’t happen to fit those cookie-cutter templates, you’re out of luck. You would not search “What food does a best friend like?” when inviting your former college roommate over for dinner, nor should you expect a tailored answer from asking the internet “What do you buy for teenagers?” or “What do you get, um, a woman?”
On top of that, many gift givers and receivers have different ideas of what makes a present “valuable.” One 2016 study found that givers tend to prioritize what the receiver feels when they open the gift; receivers, meanwhile, tend to think what matters is an item’s subsequent usefulness. A guide might lead you to something fun and surprising—but it’s harder to predict what will remain useful to your loved one, Jeff Galak, a marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University who co-authored the study, told me. To get something enduringly relevant, you have to consider the nuanced ins and outs of its owner’s daily life—in other words, you have to be paying attention to them throughout the year. “I’m gonna go and take a pretty strong stance on gift guides being mostly a disaster,” Galak said.
You might think an improvement would be to draw on a more particular kind of guide: 32 Awesome Gifts for the Boyfriend Who Loves Snowboarding, for example. But that type is actually Galak’s primary enemy. “The more specific you get into the hobbies and interests of a person,” Galak said, “the more specific that person’s needs are.” Even a gift guide designed for aficionados can’t account for the precise, idiosyncratic preferences of the passionate hobbyist. You know this if you’ve tried to buy a golf club for a golf enthusiast, or a bottle of wine for, specifically, my own father. Galak used himself as an example. He’s a bit of an espresso snob and, some time ago, had researched the exact make, model, and even color of the new machine he was in the market for. His wife “could have just said, ‘Let me go research a gift guide that says What’s a good coffee machine to get?’” he told me. “Or she could have asked me what I wanted.” Luckily, she just asked.
Read: An alternative to overspending on presents
If you’re feeling woefully uninspired, just asking is, in fact, the best recommendation I can offer. For a recipient, plainly naming what you’re looking for can feel taboo: too greedy, materialistic, or just pushy. What will they think of me if I let them know I’d like a humidifier? one might wonder. Better to make subtle comments about my dry bedroom and let them guess. But, for the gift giver, asking someone what they want can be a way to get them—and this may come as a shock—something they actually want.
If you don’t like that idea, though, I’m sure you won’t appreciate Galak’s next recommendation. “As much as it seems impersonal, I come back to the Visa gift card or to cash,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who’s like … ‘Oh, what am I going to do with that?’” It might seem ironic to suggest a present that’s even less personal than one you’d get from a guide. Gift giving is an art, though, and not everyone has time to be an artist; if you can’t get something that’s both unique and useful, just be honest about settling for only the latter. Look at it this way: If your dad really wants a brand new dopp kit, he can always use your thoughtful gift card to buy one. At least it’ll be because he actually wanted it—not because a website told you all dads do.
Gift Guides Are Useless
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07.12.2023
Gifts are personal. Gift guides are not.
Perhaps this holiday-gifting season, you’re wondering: What do I get for my dad?
It’s a difficult question, to be sure. But if you consult a holiday gift guide, the query shifts. What do you get for a dad? Then the answer becomes as clear as an oversize whisky ice cube: a book about an old president, something for golf or the grill, or—oh, a steak subscription! Your own dad’s personal taste might not be accounted for, but the deed will be done.
There are many understandable reasons for being bereft of gift ideas. Perhaps you’re a loving friend and family member but you’ve just never had a talent for gifting. Maybe you have a dozen people to buy for and not nearly enough time. Possibly you need to find something for your third nephew who’s visiting, and, frankly, you don’t know anything about him. In any of these scenarios, recommendation lists can be tempting. They’re also massively popular; plenty of people want to outsource the labor of product research and feel comforted by the support of an expert in whatever they end up choosing. Unfortunately, the gift-guide industrial complex is likely to lead you astray.
Read: Gift giving is about the buyer, not the receiver
The crux of good gift giving is........
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