Have you read Gift Cards: Don’t Do It! or maybe you’ve read Freakonomics? The first is a blog post and the second is a book, I highly recommend both. I was reading the comments in the blog post and there was a mention of the dead weight loss of Christmas. As I thought about this I had to ask, does a Yankee swap correct this? At least a little bit?
Each year my family does a Yankee swamp. One of my aunts is a bit of a gambler. She gets free nights stay at Foxwood’s Casino. Every year she puts one into the Yankee swap. Now our price limit in the swap is $50, which is pretty good. Obviously, for anyone who knows Foxwoods, a night there is worth well over $50. But to her it was free, the value of the gift could very well be a lot less.
The concept behind dead weight loss is that a lot of gifts are given during Christmas. If you pay $X for a give and the person receiving it doesn’t value the gift that high, that’s a dead weight loss. The simplest way to say this is that the recipient wouldn’t have gone out and spent $X on that gift. So they are receiving something that they value at $Y. As long as Y is less than X then there is a dead weight loss. Does a Yankee swap fix this since you get choices?
As you go through a traditional Yankee swap you get to either keep your current gift or choose someone else’s. This means that for you it’s about value. What do you value the most? Last year there was a lot of swapping and I know a couple of people left with things they weren’t very excited about. This year there was very little swapping and everyone seemed pretty satisfied. I understand that not everything is perfect but this year I think the Yankee swap did a good job of minimizing the dead weight loss.
With respect to gift cards and dead weight loss, how much of your gift cards do you look to spend? I received a few gift cards this Christmas and I used the first one yesterday. It’s a double edge sword. If I don’t use the full amount of the gift card there is a definite dead weight loss and it might hurt the economy (go read the blog post at the top) and if I make sure to spend it all I am probably going to go over and spend my own money which I didn’t plan on spending. Which is better?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I thought if you underspent on a gift card they gave you change in cash? At least in England it works like that so I always plan to slightly underspend.
As for the swaps, that is a great idea. I kind of don’t like getting gifts, not because I don’t appreciate them, but because I don’t really want or need anything.
Forest´s last blog ..Is Minimalism a worthwhile form of activism?
Forest- here in the US, change stays on the gift card, and if you return the item to the store, the money goes back onto the gift card. There is absolutely no way to receive cash back from a gift card. They don’t want you to be able to take that money and spend it in another store.
I like the idea of a Yankee swap. There’s always something you get that you really don’t care much for- in my case its calendars I get from my mom every Christmas, and clothing that happen to be white. I wear a lot of black, and some bright colors, but never white, yet I always receive white clothes.
I guess this is kind of like a White elephant swap. Everyone takes a gift that looms unwanted in their house like a white elephant, wraps it up, and does a gift exchange with others. Afterward, when they are all opened, everyone is allowed to make one trade to get something better if they want.
Throckmorton Jones´s last blog ..Random Things.
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