In Defense of the Cash Gift
This Christmas, let’s agree to stop glorifying great gift-giving
“Wait, Dale got Hulk Hands?”
— Brennan Huff, Step Brothers
Christmas is here again. In a few days, those of us who celebrate the holiday will exchange gifts. And once again, like every year before, most of us will feign wonder and excitement as we’re presented with things we didn’t ask for and don’t need.
Why are we so intent on guessing what people want when we could just give them cash and the ability to choose for themselves? The answer is twofold:
- Successful companies — namely, Apple — create products that thrill us precisely because we didn’t know we wanted them.
- Gift-giving (and receiving) is a variable-reward-schedule-based mechanism, like slot machines or cell phones.
Apple: the best gift-giver you know
Throughout the years, Apple has proven uniquely willing to ignore what people say they want in favor of what it deems people actually do. We fall in love with Apple — just as we fall in love with particularly thoughtful gift-givers — because it has done so successfully.
Consider Jobs’s famous quote:
Some people say, “Give the…
