Issue Date: November 26, 2006

In this article: Complete survey results on regifting A comedic history of regifting Regifting across the galaxy Complete Tassimo Hot Beverage/Harris Poll survey results

HOLIDAY SPIRIT

To regift or not to regift

Go ahead. You needn't feel guilty about passing on a gift to someone else. But follow these important rules first.
By Brad McKee

Regifting is an art sure to survive into the future, as Katee Sackhoff (left) and Jamie Bamber of Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica can attest.

Before the holidays hit, let's face facts: If one of the season's joys is giving, then surely one of its hidden pleasures is "regifting." Say you receive a gift -- a nice gift, like a handsome travel clock -- that you can't use, don't want or already own. You rewrap it and give it to someone else. You look generous. The recipient is appreciative. And your storage closet just got bigger. Mission accomplished.

Though the idea of regifting seems cheap or even taboo to some folks, most have come to accept it. In a Harris poll taken in August for the Tassimo Hot Beverage System, 52% of 1,505 adults surveyed said that they either had regifted or would regift in the future. Seventy-eight percent said regifting is acceptable some or most of the time.

Before you bad-mouth the idea, raise your hand if you haven't ever shown up at a dinner party with a bottle of wine or that one fruitcake that Johnny Carson said keeps circuiting the globe, originally brought to your house by someone else. That, technically, is regifting. It's an act that many people will own up to, generally speaking, but it's something that no one wants to be caught doing.

Also, consider that regifting has gone on at the highest levels of our society. According to the former first lady Nancy Reagan's hostile biographer, Kitty Kelley, Reagan is said to have regifted routinely during her years in the White House. She supposedly drew her regifts from a "discarded heap of free samples and rejects," Kelley wrote. Reagan's stash of regifts included a set of swizzle sticks (pewter, no less) with tiny elephants on top that she gave stepdaughter Maureen Reagan as a wedding present. Elephants! Talk about "party" favors.

The White House, with all the freebies and tokens that presidents get, must be a virtual regift bazaar. In October, President and Mrs. Bush are reported to have turned around a gift given to them by Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov during an October 2005 White House visit: a Bulgarian Goran shepherd. The Bushes already own two dogs, so they reportedly gave the dog to friends who have a Maryland farm.

Even Peggy Post "Excuse Me, But I Was Next," published last month. "It's OK as long as people's feelings won't be hurt," Post says. She means the feelings of the original giver and the new recipient. And you should be sure the new recipient really would like the gift. The gift must be brand new, she adds. And it can't be handmade or something the original giver took great pains to select. "I feel very strongly that some thought has to go into the process," Post insists.

She adds that her great-grandmother-in-law, Emily Post, whose etiquette advocacy she carries on with the 17th edition of Emily Post's Etiquette, likely would have had a similar view of regifting. "Emily was very practical," she says. But "generations ago, we didn't talk about regifting. There certainly wasn't the word."

Yes, the word. Perhaps a linguist could explain how the noun "gift" became the verb "regift," beyond tracing its apparent coinage to Seinfeld. In a 1995 episode involving a label maker regifted to Jerry, the show brought the term to millions of viewers who instantly got its meaning. Rest assured, though, that the practice had been in swing for generations before there were label makers or Jerry Seinfeld.

But the Tassimo survey offers evidence that regifting's broad acceptance may be in part generational. Younger people surveyed looked more favorably upon the practice: Among those ages 25 to 34, nearly half said they would likely regift in the future, compared with 27% of people ages 45 to 54 who said they would. There is also a stark gender divide in regifting habits. Sixty-three percent of women surveyed said they had regifted or would in the future, compared with 39% of men.

Yet research found that women tend to take a more "personal" approach to gift-giving than men, who take a more "economic" view of their gifts, meaning they care more about what the gift costs, says Margaret Rucker, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has studied gift-giving practices extensively across various cultures. Women are likely to put more thought into regifting than men, who are more prone to say, "Look, you need a present, and you have this thing sitting in a closet," Rucker says.

So, why waste precious closet space with a well-meant but idle gift? "If you have no use for it, it's clutter," says Linda Rothschild, founder and "chief executive organizer" of "Cross It Off Your List," a personal organizing company in New York. "And if you don't love it, need it, use it or have a strong sentimental reason for keeping it, there's no reason you can't pass it on," she adds. "It's not about regifting. It's about recycling."

Regifting makes good economic sense, too, says Joel Waldfogel, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the economic "efficiency" of gift-giving in terms of the recipient's satisfaction and perceived value. He has found that people tend to be less satisfied with things other people buy for them than with the things they buy for themselves.

"When you stick stuff in a closet, that's a tragedy," Waldfogel says, because it nullifies the value of the items. Regifting, however, "resuscitates" the value by making an item viable for use again by a new owner. Utility seems to be very much in mind among regifters as they wrap and tape. Seventy-seven percent of people in the Tassimo survey said they had regifted because the gift was "perfect" for the new recipient.

As long as you observe etiquette (and let's just say it -- get away with it), regifting doesn't corrupt the process of acting generously, says Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychology professor who has written about gift-giving behaviors. Part of the reason we like to give gifts, she observes, is because it makes us feel effective and thoughtful. Regifting, too, "does make us feel competent, or as though we look competent, because we appear to have made the [effort] all the same," Langer says.

To ensure that confident feeling, says Kristin van Ogtrop, the managing editor of "Real Simple" magazine, the No. 1 rule of regifting is to know your audience. "If you're just passing something along because it's undesirable to you and you're not sure if the person would like it, I'd say, stop right there," she says. But few people, it seems, are that cynical: Only 4% of respondents to the survey said they regifted because they didn't like the recipient.

"There are certain people I would hesitate to regift to," van Ogtrop says, citing your children's teachers. "That kind of person probably gets so many regifted things -- that scented candle or whatever. For those people, where the temptation is so high, I'd go out of my way to get something you think they'd really like."

Now, what teacher wouldn't love a travel clock?

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The Complete Regifting Survey Results
from TASSIMOTM HOT BEVERAGE SYSTEM

Experience with Regifting
--52% indicated they have regifted and-or would regift in the future.
-- Women are more likely to regift: 64% of women and 39% of men have regifted or would in the future.
-- Younger adults were more likely than their older counterparts to indicate they would regift in the future: 46% of those ages 25 to 34 vs. 36% of those ages 35 to 44 and 28% of those ages 45 to 54.
-- Those with some college experience (56%) were more likely than those with no college experience at all (46%) to have regifted or have plans to regift in the future.
-- 90% of those who have regifted before indicated that, to the best of their knowledge, they have never been caught regifting.
-- 57% of those who know or believe they have received a regift indicated the regiver was a relative.
-- Of those who have regifted, 93% have done so more than once, and 40% indicated having done so at least four times.
-- Those living in the Northeast were more likely than those in other regions of the country to have regifted during the year-end holiday season; 83% for those in the Northeast vs. 68% on average for the other regions.

Is Regifting Acceptable?
-- 78% of shoppers feel it is acceptable to regift some or most of the time.
-- Women (86%) were more likely than men (70%) to indicate that regifting is acceptable some or most of the time.

Reasons for Regifting
-- 77% of regifters said they regifted because they felt that the regift was perfect for the person they gave it to.
-- 69% felt comfortable giving a regift they received but didn't want.
-- 30% regifted because they didn't have enough money to buy a gift.
-- 9% were simply too lazy to buy a gift.
-- 4% regifted out of dislike for the recipient.

Methodology
This survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive via its QuickQuery online omnibus on behalf of Tassimo(TM) Hot Beverage System among 1,505 adults (ages 25 to 55) within the United States between Aug. 3 and 7, 2006. Figures for region, age within gender, education, household income and race/ethnicity were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting also was used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online.

If using a pure probability sample of 1,505, one could say with a 95% probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 4 percentage points. This online survey is a nonprobability sample, however, and therefore no theoretical sampling error can be calculated. Survey respondents registered to participate in online surveys with Harris Poll Online Panel.

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