Gift Service Exchanges Online Gifts

Santa's little helper writes "According to this story on New Scientist, it will soon be possible to exchange unwanted Christmas gifts before they are even shipped." I just find this amusing, my favorite part is the line 'instead of unwrapping presents, we might take turns logging on to a computer'. Click here for merry christmas.

Comments

returned gifts? online wishlists helped

[raulmazda]

The concept of the article seems like a weird way of solving the problem to me.

I have a big family (I'm 1 of 8 kids), and we do a gift exchange thing every xmas. We ran into troubles with duplicate gifts being given and slightly wrong gifts ("I wanted a small red one but you bought a big blue one instead").

So last year I hacked together some php to maintain online wishlists for everybody. Each person gets an account and maintains their own wishlist. Other people can check off items from their list to mark them as being purchased (eliminates the dupe gift problem). You can't see what's checked off on your own list, but everyone else can.

It worked out well last year, I hacked it a little more this year, and have plans for a better wishlist system next year (generic event wishlists plus some other nice frills).

(There's also giftweb at sourceforge which I originally looked at (and sent a patch), but later scrapped it as I was too far along on my own hackish solution.)

Pawn shops etc

[freeweed]

Go visit your local pawn shop, and ESPECIALLY places that deal in used video games, during the last week of December. Stores get absolutely flooded with stuff. Hell, one year I saw a kid selling 10 unopened SNES games that he received for xmas. He got all of 1/3 retail for them. I'm sure his aunts/grandmas/parents/etc would have been happy to know that 2/3 of their money went in the toilet.

Having said that, for those of us who hate paying full price for anything, the weeks immediately after xmas are a goldmine! Now am I part of the problem or what... :)