Bad Gift Idea #3: Greeting Cards

When you care enough to say something someone else wrote, which probably rhymes, and pay roughly $4 for it. Man.

I can't tell you how big of a thing my family has for greeting cards. They'll buy cards that they like -- for unknown persons and/or events which have yet to occur for years -- if ever -- and then save them for the appropriate occasion and recipient. My grandmother had shoeboxes of cards like this. PLURAL. It's insane.

Side note: My family dates the cards too. Like anyone's going to need to remember which card was given on Halloween '02 instead of Halloween '03. But I digress.

While card buyers may mean well, seriously this is just lame. It's spending money to fail at conveying something with actual meaning. At worst it's essentially choosing to not try and say anything of substance, and at best it's trying to find something someone else wrote that sounds relatively how you feel which you don't know how to articulate for yourself.



(Based on an average 2.99 card cost X 12 months in a year x 1.5 holidays per month x 3 different card-givers in family X the 30 years of my life and add a 4% minimum tax.)

Greeting cards aren't a gift in themselves (though they can contain some of the greatest gifts of all - cash and checks), but they are often attached to gifts, and they could've been actual gifts - just a part of what makes them a BAD GIFT IDEA.