Don’t Try to Make Your Holiday Packaging Perfect
The first Christmas, when my boyfriend and I were together, we went to a holiday party that some of his friends were having. Gifts were exchanged both for individuals and through the “Secret Santa” exchange. My boyfriend chose to pack his donations exclusively in bags that were so wrinkled that they looked like they had already been thrown away, old newspapers randomly taped around shoe boxes, and one gift just in an old grocery bag with a bow on it.
When I saw this packing job the day before the party, I politely suggested that maybe we go to the store for some wrapping paper and gift bags and I try again. It turns out that it would be better for us to leave the gifts in the form in which he wrapped them.
New research from the University of Nevada shows that gift wrapping clearly inflates expectations of what is inside, according to the New York Post . When someone does a less-than-outstanding packaging job, people lower their expectations of what the gift will be as they open it. This means that your badly wrapped beautiful gift will be received even better than if you spend a lot of time making it look perfect. Crappy packaging probably means crappy gift, right?
The researchers found that people who received gifts that sucked in beautiful packaging were also more upset about it than people who received the same gift in bad packaging. Like everything else, if you have high expectations when something doesn’t match them, you get frustrated. Research has shown that the feeling is even worse when a gift is given to a loved one rather than a friend.
For example, if someone hands you a folded grocery bag as a present, you probably don’t expect to have a Rolex watch inside. Conversely, you probably don’t expect this nicely wrapped gift with a nice bow to have one pair of new $ 2 socks.
All of this suggests that this crappy packaging job might not be a bad idea after all. While I argue that I will still rewind whatever ends up in my grocery shopping bag, this odd job of writing a newsfeed could have been perfect from the start.