From LifeHacker: Make your gifts more “green”:
Re-gifting is a good way to “go green,” as long as you’re not re-gifting something awful that the recipient won’t like, of course.
For kids, buy a family membership to the nearest zoo or science museum, so they can go anytime their parents will take them. It’s activity-based, learning-oriented, and environmentally sound. A lot of these memberships are transferrable, so they can use their local zoo membership to get discounts or free entrance to zoos all over the US.
For outdoorsy folks, $50 gets them a pass to the National Parks system– free admittance to all national parks for a year. Most state parks have a similar pass program.
I’m always partial to books as gifts, mainly because people don’t have the same nervousness about re-gifting, selling, or giving away a book just because it was given as a gift. Avoid writing in the inside, though, if you want the recipient to feel free to regift it.
Gift certificates to Starbucks, Jamba Juice, or locally-owned cafes and lunchtime places, are always appreciatd, and they’re generally inexpensive. A $10 gift card goes a long way at Starbucks, and the recipient can use it whenever they want.
I can’t decide whether or not I really like the idea of re-gifting. To me it shows a lack of forethought on the person re-gifting.
If anything, it should be a lack of forethought on the person giving the gift in the first place– they gave someone something they didn’t like or want!
Put another way, if you give someone something, and they don’t like it, wouldn’t it be best for them to give it to someone else, preferably someone who will like it? Or would you rather they gave the gift to charity? What if they don’t have that option (perhaps it’s inappropriate or unacceptable to charity– most charities just won’t take things they can’t use or sell).
I think it shows lack of forethought when the re-gifter just finds something around the house to hand off (usually motivated by guilt), like last year when I received a 7 year old canister of bridge mix for the holidays (at work), from someone who clearly did not originally intend to give me a holiday gift in the first place (I’m guessing on the age, based on flavor).
As a re-gift recipient, what about the re-gift would bother you? That it was something someone didn’t like? That they didn’t spend money on it? The bridge mix was a bad re-gift because it was food, and it had spoiled; it would have been a lovely gift if it had been made sometime in the 21st century. Actually, if the giver had emptied the canister and filled it with any dry good, it would have been a fine present.
Re-gifting a book is a perfectly acceptable practice, I’ve learned. Rare is the book-lover who shies away from receiving a book from someone else’s shelves. So why is it unspeakable to re-gift other things? Like glassware? Or a video game? Or a clock radio?