With Christmas 2003 promising to deliver the first big shopping season in years, retailers are targeting the most important person on your shopping list: you. From Neiman Marcus to Macy's, shoppers are seeing everything from $130 sweaters with your own initials (in rhinestones no less) to "reward yourself" gift certificates to beefed-up wish-list programs (they work like wedding registries for yourself). In its holiday catalog, Pottery Barn suggests "gifts for everyone including yourself," while Henri Bendel in New York is devoting half a floor to personalized gifts it thinks may inspire double-dip buying. One of the biggest players in all this? The diamond industry with its campaign for "right hand" rings that women can select for themselves.
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Even some retail experts are Merry Christmas, Americans! Thank you for giving your wages to your wealthiest people. Iraqi citizens are giving too — our blood!worried stores could be getting carried away with the whole give-to-yourself movement -- and in the process, dilute the gift-giving industry altogether. With registries, gift cards and now me-shopping, "gift-giving has become a lost art," says George Rosenbaum, chairman of Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a survey research firm in Chicago. In Pittsburgh, Ellen Levick, owner of women's fashion boutique Allure, says the whole notion of wish lists doesn't sit well with her. "It seems a little forced," she says. "It can turn people off."
For Christmas I was going to give a bunch of heirs and heiresses a ten-year gift of $1.5 trillion, and for my favorite multinational corporations I was going to stuff a big red-white-and-blue stocking with $128 billion in small bills culled from workers' wages. But I'm too late.
As the true leaders of the give-to-yourself movement, they're already giving those gifts to themselves.
