As much as we can’t wait for the holidays so we can forget about our problems and spend a few days with our loved ones, there are many ways this magical time can start to go wrong.
One of your customers might start asking for a holiday discount. Or maybe your nephew doesn’t like the gift you gave him. People can come up with all kinds of ways to ruin Christmas for other people.
Here’s a list of people who weren’t kind this holiday season to remind you to be. Most of them went a little too far, even in the Grinch’s eyes.
But anyone who wants to make people smile instead of a frown at Christmas should think about giving gifts.
In the US, people think they will spend $942 on Christmas gifts this year, up from $885 last year. Total spending on gifts should be more than $1 trillion. There’s a good reason for that, too.
Humans are an incredibly social species and one of the things that set us apart is forming and maintaining relationships with others,
Daniel Farrelly, a psychologist at the University of Worcester, said.
Gift-giving around holidays, birthdays, graduations or weddings is a great opportunity to reinforce those relationships.
But no matter what you buy, don’t add a small gift to a big one. When we get a bunch of gifts at once, we tend to average out their value subconsciously, so adding a small thing to a big one will lessen the impact of the big one.
This is called the “Presenter’s Paradox,” It was first shown in a 2012 study by the same name. In the study, participants were given either an iPod by itself or an iPod with a free download of one song.
When asked how much they would pay for it, those who were offered an iPod with a cheap download put a 20% lower price on it than those who weren’t. But when asked to choose which option they would give as a gift, most people chose the one with the download. This shows that when it comes to giving gifts, we don’t realize that (sometimes) less is more.
But if you run out of ideas, gift cards are always a good choice. Money is probably the only thing that everyone values equally.
But giving cash as a gift is common in some cultures, but it’s not for everyone, and it can be seen as lazy or even rude.
Gift cards have become much more popular over time. And they’re also very popular with recipients,
said Joel Waldfogel, an economist and the author of a study called “The Deadweight loss of Christmas.”
Yes, they’re not perfect—still, there’s some loss of value, and billions of dollars worth of them go unused every year—but they’re better than a set of socks that was picked out quickly or poorly.
