December 28th, 2006
The Art of Regifting
Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine discovered a friend was a re-gifter because he gave Jerry a gift of the label maker that Elaine had given to him? Americans have apparently embraced re-gifting as a recent poll reports that 78% of Americans believe that re-gifting is acceptable. And 60% of women (as compared to only 37% of men) in the poll admit to having re-gifted at some time. Men apparently (1) don’t believe in re-gifting, (2) don’t give gifts, or (3) lie to poll takers.
There is an etiquette to re-gifting, most of which involves not letting the receiver know they are getting an unwanted gift. A website, Regiftable.com has popped up that tries to provide some useful re-gifting information. Some of the info is fairly obvious (don’t re-gift a gift to the person who gave it to you) and other info useful (forget re-gifting as a last minute option and go with the gift card). But the most important point they make is that you should only re-gift if you are sure that the person you are recycling the gift to will actually like it more that you liked it. So it’s OK to re-gift that label maker as long as you are sure that Jerry actually wants it.
