A Rock To Tie A String Around

For pushing eleven years now, I have had an oversized pewter serving platter with a large flower mosaic around the border teetering on the edge of various shelves or crammed at odd angles into various closets. Under normal circumstances, I would have gotten rid of this monstrosity, if I ever had garage sales, I would have sold it. But something keeps stopping me, pulling me back from getting rid of this thing, this giant, ugly serving platter that has never seen food or a party.

It was a gift.

A very well meaning family member gave us the giant, flowered serving platter as a wedding gift. Call is superstition, or general fear that well meaning family member will wander into Goodwill and see giant, flowered serving platter on the bargain rack….call it what you will, but it’s been a part of every move, every storage decision I have made for the last eleven years. You could say that when I married my husband, I also married this giant, flowered serving platter. We’re in it for life now, and I have my well-meaning family member to thank.

NPR recently highlighted the Joel Waldfogel study of ‘The Deadweight Loss of Christmas’. Essentially, Waldfogel was talking about my giant, flowered serving platter. He theorizes that most gifts depreciate in value as soon as you give them to another person who may or may not appreciate them in the way you hoped they would.

Here’s his formula:

Estimated Cost of the Gift – What you would have reasonably paid for the gift if you were to buy it on your own = Deadweight Loss

Or
Giver’s Value (GV) – Receiver’s Value (RV) = Deadweight Loss

For example:

A few years ago my cousin bought me a bright pink pig pillow pet. Bear in mind I was 30 at the time and had no children. This was before the pillow pet was a hot ticket item…it was like a pillow pet precursor.

GV $14.99 – RV $0.00 = Deadweight Loss of $14.99

In this example, I would not have paid a dime for that giant, fluffy, pink pig pillow. So the Deadweight Loss is pretty high. Some items are a little easier to estimate. Take for example the bath set of scented lotion and body wash that my well meaning mother sent me last year for Christmas.

GV $11.99 –RV $5.00 = Deadweight Loss $6.99

Of course, in this instance you have to calculate the cost of the midnight run to RiteAid for Benadryl tablets after I used the body wash and lotion for the first time and realized that I was horribly allergic to the alluring scent of ‘NightFlower’. Maybe that’s not a good example after all…..

Waldfogel’s point was that there is a loss of value in every bad gift you give. In fact, bad gift giving amounts to nearly a 4 billion dollar loss every year just right here in America according to this Economist Article:

http://www.economist.com/node/885748

So what do we do? Not give gifts? Or do we just give them smarter?

The NPR recap of Waldfogel’s 1993 study went on to discuss the idea that what we give a person for a gift tells that person what we think of them. For example, if you give me a bar of soap and a stick of deodorant in my stocking, I might rightfully believe that you think I stink, which maybe I do.

If you give me a pink pig pillow pet at age 30, you might be telling me that you froze me in your brain at around age 10 and I have not moved past that meter despite all the usual markings of adulthood….graduation, career, marriage, credit card debt….

It made me think what my friends and family must think that I think of them. You see, The Husband and I have been giving charity gifts for awhile now, donating in someone’s name to a cause. I would like to think that my family thinks that I’m being conscientious and considerate. In reality, I think they probably think I’m lazy. I am, but I’m also trying to be conscientious.

Everyone I know is blessed with stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff. They have stuff in their kitchens, stuff sitting on their coffee tables, stuff in their closets, stuff hanging out on shelves in the garage. They complain about their stuff, they sell their stuff, they try to give me their stuff.

No one needs more stuff.

So, I started giving food. Baskets of cheeses and nuts and whatnot. And the, I discovered a perfect marriage of conscientiousness and food: charitable gift baskets.

So, here are my charitable gift choices for the new year, some are food baskets, some will just send you a nice card, but all of them will confirm to your family and friends that you might be lazy and at least you didn’t contribute to their growing collection of stuff.

http://www.onehopewine.com/

OneHope Wine Baskets: You can order wine and snack baskets and choose which charity to fund. Low end prices start at around $18.99 all the way to to $150.00

http://www.giftback.com/index.php?cName=gift-baskets-holiday-baskets

GiftBack offers a similar service, groovy themed gift baskets full of goodies and you choose which charity will receive 10% of the cost.

https://www.thehungersite.com/store/site.do;jsessionid=70AD2793092DD90344468884163A7FB1.store-b?siteId=220

The HungerSite offers a few choices. You can send fair trade, handmade goods to your friends and loved ones, or you can donate to a cause in their name. If you are going to send stuff….at least it’s responsible stuff…right?

http://OxfamAmericaUnwrapped.com

This was my personal choice this year for most of my smaller gift giving efforts. You can donate a goat, a chicken, art supplies, manure….all sorts of fun stuff in your loved one’s name and they send a nice card with a description of what their donation will do to benefit impoverished people.

http://aldousproject.com/

Want to do something truly personal and know 100% that 100% of what you donate is going to the cause you want to support? My friends are raising money to send their boy to a camp for Autistic kids this summer. The value Aldous gets from camp is immeasurable and it’s helping out a truly spectacular little boy.

So there you go everyone! Have fun donating, and remember: Down With Stuff!

Between the unemployment benefits running out and this Huffington Post column:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/03/employers-wont-hire-the-u_n_791710.html

I’m feeling my joie de vivre start to wane. It’s made me deeply grateful to be employed, even if about 83% of the people I work with are clinically insane (I’m probably among them), I am still extremely grateful not to be in this boat right now. I’m also equally terrified of ever having to face job hunting.

HuffPost echoes what I’ve read in a few news sources, basically that the craptastic job market has created a perfect storm for the unemployed. There are so many prospective employees to choose from that employers can afford to be extremely picky. They no longer have to hire ‘just anyone’; they can pick and choose and not hire a whole bunch of people.

The HuffPost article compares it to dating, and they’re not wrong. You’re out of work for an extended period of time, you get desperate. No one wants to hang out with the desperate guy who keeps giving you weird compliments even though you didn’t fix your hair, you’re not wearing any makeup and you ate a garlic sandwich for breakfast. You know you’re not hot, at least in that moment, so back the bejessus off buddy and stop sucking up.

Something like that.

So the unemployed are not being hired, instead, they’re being passed up for the already employed. The logic being that companies will lay off their worst workers first and keep their best. So if I am looking to hire the best, I will go for the guy who already has the job and steal him away from his already stable career. Kinda like Angelina Jolie.

I’ve been thinking this thing over though. There’s not much you can do about being laid off, in fact we all know that companies, school districts, etc… don’t always follow the logic of firing the worst and keeping the best. For the most part they fire the most expensive or the ones not protected by a union. Maybe I’m speaking for education only here, but it then the crappiest pop in the video teachers get to stay, and destroy education for another year.

Ugh.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s all in the marketing. You don’t have to admit you were unemployed; you simply have to come up with creative ways to express the way in which you have been spending your time.

So, here you go, my unemployed friends. Next time you go for your interview, pep up your resume with these helpful euphemisms to keep you off the desperate, job seeker list:

1. Online Social Media Consultant: Did you help you mom set up her facebook account? Have you been spending an a couple hours a day following Justin Bieber’s twitter feed? How many times have you watched Garfunkel and Oats’ youtube of ‘Sex With Ducks’? Be honest. If so, you are far from unemployed. Just because your Online Social Media Consultant business hasn’t turned a profit, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Profits are for suckers anyway.

sex with ducks
Do ahead, watch it again, you deserve it.

2. Freelance Journalist: Write a blog? It doesn’t matter that only your grandma and your sister read it. It’s freelance! Write any emails lately? Do you spend your jobless days looking for Sarah Palin articles on and cross-referencing the word asshat for the sole purpose of making snarky comments about her hair in the comment section? You’re a pundit! Congratulations! The good news is that you can tell your prospective new employers that you don’t even have to give two weeks notice, as your boss (you) gives you permission to moonlight.

3. Virtual Marketing Supervisor: Did you sell all your DVDs and old textbooks last month on Amazon so you could pay your cell phone bill? Good for you! And congratulations on starting your new career as an online merchant. Did you sell your child’s old bouncy swing on eBay? Excellent, you are now a child development retailer consultant. Did you bore your friends with stories about waiting for Amazon to cut you your check (it takes them freakin’ ever sometimes….I’ll tell you about it later…snore.)? Congrats! You did some marketing for your ebusiness hub.

4. Beauty and Health Consultant: Comb the mats out of your cat’s fur last month? I did. My cat looks 79% more luxurious, that’s exactly what I will put on my resume. In a fit of jobless angst, did you obsessively pluck your eyebrows into oblivion by accident only to snap out of it and realize you were looking a little Whoopi Goldbergish (get it? Cause she doesn’t have any eyebrows….) Don’t worry! You’re in the startup phase, accidents are bound to happen.

So there you are friends, these are just a few of the ways in which you can freshen up your resume. Good luck and remember, no one can fire you if you cut them off midsentence and run down the hallway yelling ‘I quit.’