My mother was one of the great gift givers of all time.
She spent her life finding the perfect gift for the people she loved. She thought the perfect gift was something you would love but wouldn't or couldn't buy for yourself. And the Christmas shopping season was just an opportunity to find lots of perfect gifts in a short period of time.
Most of the lessons I've learned about gift giving came from watching my Mom. And most of them came in the late 1950s as I was passing into adolescence and when shopping and Christmas shopping were a lot different.
One thing that is different is that the season is a lot longer now. It used to start at the end of the Thanksgiving Day parade when Santa climbed off his sleigh and strode into Macy's flagship store on Herald Square. Today it seems to start a lot earlier.
A couple of Halloweens ago, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and I began to run out of candy with an hour or so of trick-or-treating left to go. I was dispatched to the store to find more Halloween candy but there wasn't any. There was only Christmas candy, already up on the shelves with a month to go before Thanksgiving.
There are other ways that Christmas shopping is different now. Here's how things went this last week when we set out to buy gifts for my grandsons.
We started online at Amazon, where my daughter Debbie had posted a wish list with things her boys wanted. That made a couple of choices easy, but it turned out that some of the items we wanted were out of stock.
We decided to check a local store. Yep, sure enough, they had what we wanted in stock and they were open until midnight. We headed right over there to gather up gifts.
As we were pulling the items we wanted off the shelves I used my cell phone to call Debbie in California. I wanted her to know what we'd bought so she could take them off the online wish list. I also talked with her about some other gift ideas I had for the boys.
When we'd finished shopping at the store we checked out and paid for our purchases with a credit card. Then we headed back home to finish our shopping online. It was all very different from my Mom’s shopping in the fifties.
Mom did most of her shopping at a single department store, Macy's. That was where she could get the best selection in a single place. She'd supplement what she found there with purchases at a few specialty stores. Back then department stores were the king of the retail hill.
That's changed a lot. By the late fifties the malling of America was already changing the world for department stores. Then in the sixties came the giant big-box stores, Wal-Mart and Kmart, followed by the category killers like Home Depot and Staples.
Today the closest thing to a one-stop shopping location for Christmas presents is probably Amazon. They've built a loyal base of customers who trust Amazon to provide choices, information, and reliable shipment. Amazon, in turn, has added lots of different product lines to the original books-only format.
Take toys. Toys R Us couldn't make a go of their own Web site, so they cut a deal with Amazon. Amazon runs their site for them. Look for toysrus.com and you wind up on Amazon. It's the same for imaginarium.com. This is a partnership. You can add toys to your Amazon wish list.
There's a somewhat looser connection for a host of other "stores." These are names you're familiar with like Land's End, Foot Locker, Nordstrom, Target, etc. Here Amazon is functioning as a gateway to the Lands End or Footlocker or whoever store. Stuff from these stores won't show up on Amazon wish lists. The one-click ordering feature doesn't work.
Even at that Amazon has turned into something of a cross between the department store of my mother's day and an online mall. It gives you one place on the Web to go for lots of merchandise. It's convenient. And we love convenient.
Mom shopped in person. Not only was there no Net then, there were virtually no catalog or telephone sales on the scale that we know them now. The catalog players were folks like Sears, Montgomery Ward and Penney's and very few others. That was because the basic infrastructure wasn't in place yet for that kind of business.
The telephone was simply too expensive back then to use for shopping. The call that I made to Debbie in California cost me pennies. In the late fifties it would have cost dollars. Several of them. Toll free phone lines didn't exist.
There were also no credit cards then. There were charge cards and some limited revolving charge accounts at individual stores, but the general purpose cards like Visa and MasterCard wouldn't be around for most folks until the late sixties.
Until those two conditions changed it simply didn't make sense for folks to place telephone orders for goods unless they already had an account with a particular store. But once 800 numbers and general purpose credit cards were available, catalog sales took off.
One catalog marketer that I knew used to say that he could guess your household income if he could weigh the catalogs you received at the house over a three month period. Americans loved their catalogs and catalog marketers rewarded them by sending more and more.
Then when the Web came along, it was supposed to cut down the number of catalogs in your mailbox. Well if you believe that happened you obviously haven't been out to check the mail lately. The catalog marketers are sending out lots of catalogs because they get more sales that way.
What catalog marketers have found is that a Web site and a catalog are not an either/or choice. Instead the same customers tend to use both, but for different purposes and at different times. They form a triad with the physical store. Companies with all three, marketing them together, seem to be doing the best. It's a very different world from Mom's.
What would Mom have thought about today's Christmas shopping? I think she'd like some things and deplore others.
She'd love the tools that allowed her to consider more gift possibilities. She'd love the Net, especially wish lists, lots of product reviews and savvy gift recommendations. She'd love the ease of Net and telephone ordering. Those things would make it easier for her to find her perfect gifts.
But I think she'd deplore the extension of the season along with all the things that make it easy to give a gift without thinking about it and without giving a piece of yourself along with it.
Today it's too easy to get caught up in a frenzy and see gift shopping as some kind of a race to the Christmas finish line. That wasn't how it was for my mother. For Mom, gift giving was an act of love and a way to touch people. It wasn't just checking items off a list.
Ultimately, changes in technology wouldn't make much difference. If my mother were alive today she'd use whatever tools and options were available to do what she did Christmas after Christmas when she was with us—find the perfect gift for each of the people she loved.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 16 December 2002
