Regifting

Dec. 4th, 2003 01:06 pm
magid: (Default)
[personal profile] magid
Yesterday I saw a Macy's ad on a bus with the slogan "Regifting is for wimps". My initial reaction: no, it's not, and what an obvious sort of commercial, playing off people's insecurities. And then in today's Globe there's an article on regifting, the etiquette thereof, etc. Perhaps it's my thriftiness/cheapness/frugality coming to the fore, but it just doesn't seem like that big a deal.

I've always thought that if someone gave me a gift that I didn't need/ already had one/ was the wrong size and not returnable/ was inconvenient in some way or another (Where to put that life-sized stuffed baby elephant?), it was perfectly acceptable to give it to someone else, if I thought the next recipient would enjoy it. I don't know that I'd go tell the original giver, but if they asked about it, I would tell them why I'd regifted, and that would be that.

Of course, it matters more to me what other people think about this one, since you/they would be the pool of recipients and/or original givers. So.... what do you think about regifting? Is it perfectly ok? Is it ok only as long as no one twigs on to what you're doing? Is it ok only if there's a significant amount of time before regifting? Or is it completely anathema?

Date: 2003-12-04 12:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] magid.livejournal.com
Heh. I guess I think of it as what my mom learned in school, and used mainly in aging mainframes. (Which is not to imply that my mom has an aging mainframe :-).
Time to revise that bit of brain.

COBOL

Date: 2003-12-05 07:13 am (UTC)
cellio: (avatar)
From: [personal profile] cellio
I was somewhat surprised and a bit annoyed when, in 1994, I was assigned the task of documenting the COBOL interface for my company's high-tech, C-based, forward-looking product. There were still enough potential customers out there using COBOL that it made sense to do that work...

(The reason I was annoyed was that this forced me to learn COBOL -- at least enough to understand our APIs so I could explain them to others in the COBOL user's frame of reference. The language was pretty cumbersome, especially for someone coming from the relative terseness of C.)

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