Making a Gift

You might think knowing when not to send a gift requires very little in the way of common sense. I thought so, too. But having run a business that made gift purchases its bread and butter for more than six years, I can tell you that this particular bit of common sense remains far too uncommon.

Some of the ignorance stems from unfortunate unfamiliarity with other cultures. In one series of examples, several well-meaning souls wished to send baskets full of fresh-baked goodies to their Jewish co-workers or friends in honor of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Not realizing that the day features fasting, prayer and abstention from worldly pleasures as its main components, these would-be benefactors risked creating awkwardness, if not outright offense.

In another case, the friend of a recently divorced man ordered a congratulatory gift basket in honor of the court decision denying the father custody of his children.

In these and similar cases, we managed to convince the customer that congratulations or food might not suit the occasion as well as he or she had assumed. In declining these orders we forfeited about a thousand dollars in potential revenue, but we simply could not bring ourselves to fill these orders.

Other inappropriate gift occasions exist, of course, and we shall examine more of them next time.

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