‘tis the fucking gift card

I have this love-hate relationship with gift cards, those little pieces of plastic that are just as good as cold cash at the assigned store. Most love-hate relationships are as unexplainable as the children-oriented Rambo cartoon. This love-hate, on the other hand, is blatantly simple: I love receiving gift cards but I hate giving gift cards.

Give me a gift card to Best Buy or Media Play and I will pass you the tiara of best-est-friend-ship. The rusting twisted metal, sparkling cut glass, and decomposing pink feathers will proclaim you Friend of the Year, but please be careful not to get tetanus from those jagged edges… I’d hate to lose my best friend, especially if you’re going to hook me up with another gift card for my birthday in July (and remember that it’s never too early to start planning for my birthday).

With a gift card, I’m free to indulge the throbbing impulsive spending desires that flow through these puffy blue veins. What’s the flavor of the day, Shenry? Music, movies, videogames? Dare I combine gift cards for larger purchases? Oh, dear lord, I’m trembling like a shaved smurf seeking warmth in a penguin’s ass! Shower me with gift cards. I will strip naked and let the deluge of cold plastic pieces wash over me.

Sure, I prefer cards from Best Buy, Media Play, and even Target, but for practical purposed I’m nondiscriminatory. I’ve never stepped foot in a Crate & Barrel, yet give me a gift card and I’m there. I’m positive that I can find a nice crate and/or barrel that fit my lifestyle. Tiffany & Company is the retail equivalent of Skeletor to my He-Man; it is the embodiment of everything I find unholy. Give me a Tiffany gift card and I may break my silent rebellion long enough to send one of my agents, like Man-at-Arms, into the store for a quick purchase.

So sweet to receive…

…So bitter to give.

The most impersonal gift in the world is $20. Not that I’m opposed to receiving $20, but a twenty-dollar bill shows that I’m too lazy to shop for your sorry ass. In fact if the ATM spit out smaller bills you’d get $10, but you’re not worth the effort required to break the bill… so merry Christmas.

The second most impersonal gift is the gift card. I can’t bring myself to give these stupid plastic rectangles to friends and family. I’m going to give you something that makes you think of me every time you look at it and shudder with repressed repulsion. Yes, I’m going to put time and effort into your present. If I’ve budgeted $20 for your gift, maybe I can score on a sale and get you $30’s worth of baggy sweatpants. Or perhaps I can find you a hand-carved wooden monkey with a fez that only cost $17. Cool, I pocket $3 for Taco Bell and we both win. Maybe you didn’t want a wooden monkey with a fez and you’ll use it as fireplace kindling. Maybe you’ll love the monkey in a way that is usually reserved for consenting adults. Maybe, out of disappointment that I didn’t get you The Best of Huey Lewis & The News, you’ll fling the monkey fez first at the back of my unsuspecting head. Whatever the case, I put time and effort into that monkey, even if I did find him under the merry-go-around at the park. That monkey is an embodiment of my love to you and his little fez is the exclamation point. Love! A gift card cannot do what the little wooden monkey does.

I feel uncomfortable when people know exactly how much I spent on them and with gift cards it’s counterproductive to hide the amount the card is worth. Perhaps this is a personal issue and I need to deal with it. See, the dollar amount of a gift card is an undeniably solid number that quantifies my love for you. Screw that. I am not stratifying my friends and relatives into tiers of $100, $50, $20, and not-worth-the-plastic. I will, however, stratify you into sweatpants, wooden monkey with fez, The Best of Huey Lewis & The News, and no-present-for-you. Tiers such as these are abstract and nonrepresentational. How can you compare?

Yet another fundamental problem I have with giving gift cards is that the card is not a gift in and of itself. The gift card is like half a gift and the recipient must follow through on the potential contained therein. I know if I receive gift cards that they won’t last past the first weekend in January. Those things are tapped dry as fast as my stamina allows. When I give a gift card I have no control on follow through. How do I know that the gift card isn’t just gathering dust in your sex toy drawer? Perhaps you used the gift card once to scrape dried semen off the ceiling and then you forgot about it. Now, PEZident of America (the world’s largest PEZ distributor) has gone bankrupt and your gift card is condemned to a life of cum scraping. Sad. This shit happens. Last year $4 billion worth of gift card went unused. I can’t allow my money to get lost in some department store’s bottom line.

I love it when I receive gift cards, yet I refuse to give them. This double standard is silly… it’s self-contradictory… it’s pointless… it defies logic… and it’s unsurprising coming from me. There you have it; I’ve stated my position on this issue quite clearly. You know what to give me this holiday season and, conversely, you know what I won’t be giving you.
...and so it was written, shenry at 12/11/2003 09:47:00 AM.
...and so it was appended with .