I was visiting with my friend Anna, a 25-year-old interior decorator, not long ago on a warm summer afternoon when the doorbell rang unexpectedly. Anna disappeared to see who it was, and I continued to chat with Jamie, her new husband, about their Caribbean honeymoon until his wife interrupted us.
“Jamie, we got another one,” Anna called, resignation audible in her voice, from the hallway, before she returned carrying a heavy box with a large Crate and Barrel label prominently displayed on all sides. They opened the package with none of the excitement one might have expected of a young couple surveying their spoils to discover that Anna’s cousin David and his wife Sara had sent them a portable cast-iron grill. Jamie quickly closed the package up again and carried it to the closet, where he added it to a teeming collection of similar boxes from Tiffany, Williams-Sonoma and Target.
Most of the couples I know who register for wedding gifts think of the process as a fabulous shopping spree on someone else’s account. They let their imaginations run wild. Should we get napkins in blue or green? Should the hors d’oeuvres platter be gold or silver? Birch or maple salad bowls? “Put us down for the stainless steel version…make that two!” No longer just for place settings and linens, wedding registrations have evolved to the point where couples can now add tents, lumber, and stereos to their wish lists.
Anna and Jamie, however, had a different kind of wish list. They’ve been into gourmet cooking for years, so their kitchen is already stocked with coordinating plates, and all the spring pans, Italian bottle stoppers, microplane zest graters and professional-quality slicing, grinding and pureeing appliances they could ever need. They’ve lived together for a couple of years, so their bathroom already has matching plush towels, and they’re very happy with their Egyptian cotton sheets. They simply didn’t need most of the wedding gifts they received, as much as they appreciated the generosity of those who sent them. What they really wanted, instead, to get their married life off to a good start was something different.
Anna and Jamie didn’t want crystal. They wanted a condo. But of course, there’s no real trade-off there, between wedding gifts and the down-payment it takes to buy an apartment – or is there?
Anna’s original plan regarding wedding gifts was to forgo the registry process altogether and tell anyone who asked them what they’d like for their wedding that their preference would be for cash. Jamie’s mother hadn’t liked that idea, and convinced her future daughter-in-law that registering was the right thing to do. It would be risky not to register because inevitably some people would prefer to give an actual gift and they were likely to get stuck with a bunch of things that they would never have chosen for themselves.
So, Anna was persuaded -- and a month after the wedding her closets were filled with things that she’d chosen, but didn’t really need, or even want. And, to add insult to injury, she and Jamie had finally stumbled across a new development downtown with an apartment that was just what they were looking for.
Why couldn’t they just take the presents back, I wondered. Certainly, their friends would understand, and be happy that they’d helped them afford the one thing they truly wanted.
Of course, they’d thought of that, but most retailers that provide wedding registries will only accept returns if you’re making exchanges, or for store credit, they told me.
What they hadn’t thought of – probably because they didn’t know – was that, today, there’s a brisk market for store credit to prominent, national retail stores if you know where to go. Store credit may not be as good as cash to the stores that issue it, but it might be worth just that – cash – to someone else.
An analysis of thousands of gift card transactions on eBay reveals that store credits to popular retailers fetch very close to their face value in the secondary market, where they usually sell for 80 to 90 percent of their original cost, depending on the store and the amount. A quick search found that just the day before Anna, Jamie and I were talking, a card for $500 of store credit at Target sold for $450, a $175 Tiffany gift card fetched $135, and a $200 Crate and Barrel exchange credit receipt got $188.99, shipping included.
In the booming world of secondary markets – dominated by eBay -- buyers are actually competing vigorously for store credit in order to save a few dollars on purchases at their favorite stores. In some cases, the buyer pool is so robust that store credit on eBay is just about as good as cash, and generally, the higher the dollar value, the lower the proportional discount will be, so that, in fact, the discount is substantively not that much different from paying a commission to a currency exchange when you change your money in a foreign country.
Would they, I asked Anna and Jamie, be willing to exchange their presents for cash on the secondary market if they could get 80 cents on the dollar?
Indeed they would.
The three of us set out on a reverse shopping spree. Anna’s cheeks reddened at one return counter when the clerk asked why she wanted to return all her gifts. Caught off guard, she mumbled something about the wedding having been called off (Jamie had waited in the car), after which the clerk obliged and issued her a card worth $4,500 of store credit. By the time we got to the next store, she just said she was moving to L.A. and wanted to buy directly from the local branch when she got there. It worked.
We ended the day with more than $15,000 in store credit cards.
Anna has an eBay account, but she had previously only bought a few hard to find household items through the site over the years, and had never even thought of auctioning anything herself. Because she was such an infrequent user, she didn’t have any customer service so-called “feedback” ratings from the site – which would assure her potential customers that she was a trustworthy seller who would deliver the goods as promised and in a timely manner. The kinds of shoppers who frequent eBay have enough experience to know that they’d rather buy a $4500 item from someone who’s sanctioned by other users through positive feedback, so Anna wasn’t likely to get maximum value for her gift cards if she posted them on her own. So I suggested she let a more proficient (and well reputed) middleman deal with it for her. We took the gift cards to a popular local dropshop, stores that take your items and sell them for you in online auctions. Anna filled out some quick forms, which gave the store’s employees – experts in the orchestration of online auctions – a license to arrange and execute the processes.
A few weeks later, Anna called to tell me that her cards had sold for more than $12,000. She and Jamie were thrilled. And significantly closer to having the money they’d need for a down payment. Once Anna saw how easy it was to sell the cards through the dropshop, she looked through her closets to see what other unwanted or neglected possessions she could sell for even more cash to put toward the condo. The following week, she made three separate trips to the dropshop, bringing in everything from seasons old pieces of clothing, to the electronic organizer she’d never learned how to use, to her childhood Barbie doll collection.
I had created a monster.
Excerpted from FutureShop by Daniel Nissanoff. First published in 2006 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright Daniel Nissanoff, 2006.
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