Giving gifts at Christmas is an ancient idea, going back to the day when gold, frankincense and myrrh made up the first shopping list. But only recently have social scientists begun to examine why the ritual, now a backbone of Western retailing, causes such anxiety.
Christmas, as a religious festival, should be a time of shared love, but for many people, the days leading up to it, and the letdown afterward, are times of dread, intimidation, self-loathing and disappointment. Despite Dickens, and other seasonal popularizers, it`s not always a pretty time.
”Nobody ever gives me lingerie. I always get books,” Chicago novelist Toni Schlesinger recently moaned. Conversely, she said, ”I go through insanity trying to find things. Gifts never measure up to the intensity of feelings you have for people.” That, in a nutshell, scientists say, is about it.
The problem, according to Mary Ann McGrath, who teaches consumer behavior at Loyola University and has done extensive anthropological field work in gift shops, lies in the changed role of Christmas gifts. In a curious way, over the centuries, they have evolved from minor tokens of affection, such as the cakes, apples, nuts and small toys favored in the Middle Ages, to become a kind of once-a-year report card for all significant relationships.
These days, as McGrath and other researchers have noted, a Christmas gift has become a way of answering the question, ”What do I think of that person?” Or, ”What does that person think of me?” This intense pressure to select properly, which involves placing substantial psychological burdens on, say, a set of wind chimes for your mother, can lead, if fumbled, to considerable grief.
”To make the right gift, you have to get a lot of things right,”
McGrath noted in an interview in her book-lined office at 10 E. Pearson St., a few blocks from one current focus of gift shopping, the stores of North Michigan Avenue.
It takes, she went on, a sense of the other person, of that person`s life, of the emotional connections, of a suitable object at a suitable price from a suitable store in suitable wrapping. ”There is,” she said, ”a sense that the giver both `knows` and `cares` about the receiver.”
Now an assistant professor of marketing at Loyola, McGrath first became interested in American gift-giving and -receiving behavior five years ago while working on her doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University. Rather than idly theorize, she joined forces with John Sherry Jr. and Sidney Levy, both Northwestern marketing professors. The three staked out two upscale North Shore gift shops, the kind of places, McGrath said, that have ”things you don`t need, but can`t live without.” Since then, in papers prepared for academic publications such as the Journal of Retailing and Interpretative Consumer Research, they have reported on findings at the two stores, given the fictional code names of ”The Mouse House” and ”Baubles.”
Using techniques that ranged from hanging around and asking questions to using a detailed questionnaire involving sentence completion, storytelling and recounting of dreams, the team worked to bring forth perceptions of how shoppers felt about buying, receiving and returning gifts. Much of the work involved identifying and unsorting a scramble of personal feelings and merchandising strategies.
For example, they reported, at ”The Mouse House,” a quaint little gift shop tucked away near the corner of a festively lighted concourse of a very upscale suburban retail strip, nestled among restaurants, doctors` offices, specialty food stores, boutiques, spas and beauty parlors, the window display was a traditional American Christmas scene. It featured a decorated tree, ornamental angels and a host of assorted Christmas knickknacks.
Upon opening the door, the customer was greeted by soft strains of seasonal carols and the aromatic scent of a ”Christmas brew” simmering on a kettle by the sill. An elderly golden labrador greeted customers by the door, receiving frequent pats and comments from those entering and leaving the store. Some customers were ”startled into laughter by the movement of a dog presumed to be stuffed.”
The store, the researchers found, was filled with merchandising tricks. Aisles were narrow. Displays were cornucopic, forcing customers to move slowly, so as not to upset or overlook items. Merchandise was hung from walls and ceiling beams, and placed in hutches and on chairs and couches, to further the idea that the store was overflowing with treasures.
No signs urged browsers to refrain from handling the often-costly merchandise. In fact, such handling was expected and encouraged. Another idea was that of ”uniqueness.” Duplicates, though available, were stored in the back.
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Merchandise included jewelry, statuary, tapestries, figurines, dolls, paintings, nail sculptures, crystal birdhouses, baseball hats with antlers, kaleidoscopes, marionettes, whiskey decanters, brass rocking horses, ceramic sundials and gag medicinal products, such as ”vasectonomy pills.”
A ceramic dog substitute
Much of the work of shoppers, they reported, was in matching the right gift to the right person.
One young woman, looking for something ”unique and unusual” for her child`s teacher, picked a clown figurine, appropriate, she thought, for a teacher who is a weekend mime. A middle-aged woman, on her second tour of the store, picked a birdhouse with a golfing theme, for her sister`s husband, who loves both golf and birds. An elderly man, who later purchased a ceramic schnauzer, was drawn there not because of anything specific, but because his wife likes the shop. ”We travel too much,” he said, ”and we can`t have a real dog. I think she`ll like this.”
Another man arrived with a list of collectibles drawn up by his wife. His contribution was to add more items than his wife expected, speeding up her collection pace with a gift of $500 worth of tiny creatures, including a mouse family with a male infant that, he said, reminded him of his grandson.
”I`m the world`s worst shopper,” he said. ”I hate it. I won`t go to a department store and fight the parking. This store reflects a buyer with good taste. Merchandise is nicely displayed. I know my gift will be a good reflection on me.”
`I love that!`
The aim of ”The Mouse House,” the team found, was to mimic a fantasy living room. Sales clerks, known as ”the Mice,” answered questions (”will this tureen look good on an early American table?” ”is this good for a grandmother?”) in an upbeat style, but they rarely initiated a sales conversation, preferring to carpet sweep, dust or otherwise tend to the merchandise. When choices were made, they were encouraging, in a soft-spoken way, usually murmuring either ”That`s wonderful!” or ”I love that!”
The team`s other research site, ”Baubles,” in the downtown area of an older suburb, featured porcelains and handicrafts, including baskets woven from roots, woolen throws, woven wall hangings, masks, copper trays, Art Deco jewelry, terra cotta framed mirrors, painted wooden bowls, geese shaped from moss and papier-mache human sculptures.
Form, rather than function, qualified goods for ”Baubles.” Thus, the store carried functional towel and pot racks, stools, bookmarks and scissors, but only in unusual colors, abstract designs or animal shapes, such as toilet plungers in the shape of flamingos (for $17).
One year, ”Baubles” stocked country merchandise, such as a stool painted to reflect the coloring of a cow, with an udder on the underside, and a stuffed Christmas duckling in a vest. Later, the store changed to Southwestern furniture, art and gimcracks, many of them decorated with snakes. That was followed by a Third World focus, from Mexican blankets to carved salad tongs from Africa.
Searching for revelation
Tracking what customers liked, researchers found that, at ”Baubles,”
many mentioned the calm atmosphere, an ambiance heightened by the playing of classical music ”to calm things down,” as the manager explained.
For many shoppers, especially males, the selection of a particular item came after they chose ”Baubles” as a questing ground, with no clear prior knowledge of what they sought there. Instead, the team noted, they had a feeling that, ”if an appropriate gift existed, it must be concealed within the walls of this store, and would reveal itself, if they rooted diligently enough.”
This reinforced a conception of ”the gift as mystery,” as well as the notion that many consumer goods exist largely as screens reflecting blurry and fleeting images that consumers cast over them.
”In my youth I used to try to be creative and buy things I liked. It was a disaster,” a male ”Baubles” shopper admitted. ”Now I just ask for a list, and she`s happy.”
Another man was disappointed to find that a specific ceramic clock for which he had come was not in stock.
”You know how it is when you have your mind on something,” he said. He ordered the clock for delivery in six weeks and had the clerk wrap a box containing a note explaining his inability to produce the clock for Christmas. Sentiment vs. substance
One early discovery was that, for the most part, holiday gift-giving is the work of women. Men shop late, if at all, often arriving at stores the week, or even the day, before Christmas.
Another was that gifts between spouses are especially tricky. ”Giving your wife anything that plugs in is death,” McGrath observed.
What is needed, the group concluded, is a balance between sentiment and substance.
A gift from a child to parents, such as a hand-crafted tie-rack, can be high on sentiment, low on substance. Gifts between in-laws can be low on sentiment, but are often high on substance, often leaning toward expensive but uncommon appliances, such as home bread ovens or pasta makers.
”It`s best when a gift becomes part of your life. You incorporate it, and the giver, who probably fretted through the whole process of choosing the gift, actually becomes the gift,” McGrath said. ”A successful gift is incorporated into the recipient`s life and the relationship is bolstered.” At least until next Christmas.
Striking back
What happens when, gasp, a gift is not successful?
That leads, McGrath added, to one of the most difficult questions of the whole gift-giving process: what to do with disasters?
In some cases, gifts are banished to a distant outpost, such as a closet, an attic or outdoors. Or they may be destroyed, sometimes with venom, an act that some see as an attempt to exorcise the unpleasant effect of an unsatisfactory gift by allowing the recipient to reassert autonomy and a sense of self.
Other gifts are moved along in some way, either by lateral recycling, to a person much like the person who gave it, or to a charity, or downward, to a domestic, or anyone else who will take it.
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For some, the researchers found, the subject of returning gifts was so painful that they were reluctant to talk about it directly, disguising their answers as, in a common phrasing, ”what other people probably do.”
People returning gifts often resented the giver. (”They should have known me better.”) One woman complained that her father and his new wife had given her daughter a coat. In her questionnaire, she wrote of herself in the third person, saying: ”Who buys a child a winter coat halfway through the winter? She believed her father and his new wife`s ignorance of that was meaningful. Her rejection of this coat was a rejection of her father, too, along with his new wife and new house and new distance. She swung the coat up on the return counter. `This thing is all wrong,` she said.”
Others, unable to express anger at the giver, took it out on the store, by being snippy in line and quarrelsome with return clerks.
”The implication for a store is to train their people not to take it personally, to be super nice, to give satisfaction wherever possible,”
McGrath said.
She also suggested that retailers play up to the anger, urge customers to bring in ”most-hated gifts” and receive, say, a $20 voucher toward a more satisfactory item.
Perhaps something in a flamingo theme?