Commentary: All these corporate greeting cards and presents are not gifts. They're spam
SINGAPORE: I opened a huge envelope on Friday (December 13) containing what is now my 4th 2022 desk calendar and a greeting card.
Why exercise I demand four desk calendars? Why practice I demand ANY? I don't.
Like virtually people, the only calendar I employ resides on my smartphone and is synced to my work emails and personal schedule.
But at present I'm confronted with a huge moral dilemma pondering what to do with a gift like this, which was sent by a company with which I have had intermittent contact.
Frankly, the best instance scenario is – where possible – to put them straight into the newsroom's recycling bins. Only some of these calendar have pages coated in plastic, making them tough to recycle.
Notwithstanding, a better solution would be for the givers not to send such wasteful items in the first place. After all, not but are things such every bit desk-bound calendars largely redundant, they also rarely have the desired effect of creating a positive feeling about the companies which transport them.
Zilch screams thoughtlessness like a pre-fabricated, mass-printed card that is as personal as the dozens of flyers that come through our mail service boxes.
There wasn't even a signature or a handwritten annihilation on the menu accompanying the calendar.
I get information technology. At that place's a huge listing of Christmas greeting cards to get through, and so why not leverage technology to reap economies of scale and let Microsoft Excel unshackle y'all from the bodily need to remember most something to write?
The ability of automation has freed us from the mundane humdrum of meaningless tasks and surely doing up that corporate Christmas gift list must be the first to become.
And then MANY WONDERFUL TIMES OF THE YEAR
Yep, it is that virtually wonderful time of the year again isn't it?
Where pantries and snack corners in offices and workplaces will be filled with mostly unwanted gifts and suspiciously packaged foods. As the vacation season progresses, those areas volition start to overflow, provoking the dominate to send out a passive-ambitious office email implying we've all been barbarians and asking for the scourge to be cleaned out.
And as the pile of goodies grows, so the identities of the companies that sent them will be forgotten – if they're fifty-fifty registered in the beginning place.
This nightmare isn't unique to Christmas. Every Chinese New year's day and Mid-Autumn Festival, this ghoulish bicycle haunts united states like an former photo post with the ex that Facebook keeps reminding you about every year.
The Mid-Fall festival is maybe the worst when it comes to meaningless corporate gifts that create mountains of waste.
READ: Elaborate mooncake packaging difficult to recycle and damaging to the surround, experts say
With the packaging getting e'er more fancy, it fills me with horror when I encounter how each mooncake is sometimes wrapped in plastic, placed inside a plastic tray, which sits inside an individual cardboard container, which is stacked inside an even bigger paper-thin box.
Corporate souvenir buyers should know that I'grand non impressed past such intricate packaging – I'm appalled by it.
CORPORATE PROTOCOLS
It escapes me why and then many companies notwithstanding choose to participate in this almanac mindless ritual of holiday gift-giving.
NUS Business organisation School Assistant Professor Adelle Yang one time suggested we buy gifts to wow the recipients and create a good impression of ourselves. This souvenir-equally-self-advertisement argument seems like a sensible caption that extends to organisations.
Understandably, corporate protocol dictates the primacy of form and custom, sometimes over substance. And then the number of recipients can only get larger over time.
The thinking commonly goes: We've been doing this for years so what if someone notices that we've dropped them from our Christmas gift list and gets offended?
Unless you're giving out Apple tree iPhone 11s (no one is, I checked), it's condom to assume few will pick up on that.
READ: Commentary: why Apple tree users remain incredibly loyal
KILLING THE ENVIRONMENT
Much has been said about our profligate consumerism and the incredible corporeality of waste that goes to landfills, and yet this practice persists.
Expect, I'm no Greta Thunberg but there's something inconsistent about corporate norms when profit-driven companies say they want to honor the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and factor emissions into investment decisions, withal carry on with useless souvenir-giving.
Marketplace forces may be driving the individual sector into the arms of climate activeness. But our beast spirits are stuck in the offset industrial revolution.
Sadly, it's not simply the individual sector which seems obsessed with conspicuous displays of largesse. Some of the biggest and most wasteful gifts I received were from climate change and surroundings-related organisations. I also become gifts from public-sector entities.
Hopefully, Minister for Surroundings and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli talking this week about how the existential claiming of climate change requires global action will give some corporate gift-givers pause for thought.
This broader culture of gift-giving waste that needs serious rethinking includes burgeoning National Day Parade funpacks and ballooning conference welcome packs – gestures that aim to make yous feel good about attending an event but which follow you home like a bad hangover subsequently ane too many glasses of prosecco and sits in your living room similar an ugly wine stain.
Nosotros've passed the Resource Sustainability Nib but it looks like our Christmas greetings and gifts beak is something nosotros need to look closer at.
READ: Commentary: When that funpack becomes too much fun for our planet
WASTE Not WANT NOT
Economist Joel Waldfogel at the The states National Bureau of Economic Research has been urging us to quit souvenir-giving for decades.
His 1993 groundbreaking research even shows there'southward a huge deadweight loss when we buy presents for others. And that'south for people in our lives we really like.
If not gifts, then what? Economists propose the best nowadays is cash but I doubt outright bribery is on anyone'southward wish list. Santa Claus may not be watching simply CPIB will be.
How nigh a nice e-mail of a few lines? As a writer, I relish it when people spend time selecting words to express appreciation.
If ane really insists on a gesture, why non donate to a worthy cause in someone'due south name? At least the coin will be put to practiced utilise.
Otherwise, I say that no souvenir and no menu is the best way to get.
Just please terminate throwing all these things in my general direction. It's not gifting. It's spamming.
Lin Suling is executive editor at CNA Digital News where she oversees the Commentary section and the new Eye of the Affair podcast.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/commentary-all-these-corporate-greeting-cards-and-presents-are-not-gifts-theyre-spam-293716
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