PRESS RELEASE

Holiday Gift Mismatches May Waste $70m in NS

If Nova Scotians are as incapable of choosing the right gifts as Americans, they will waste $70 million this holiday season buying the wrong presents. A survey in New Haven, Connecticut, found that holiday gift-giving destroys up to one-third of the value of gifts, because recipients do not want, use or value what they receive.

The survey asked respondents what they would be willing to pay for the gifts they received, and found that they were willing to pay 30% less on average than what their friends and relatives had actually paid. This loss in value is regarded as a very conservative estimate, as the survey question assumes the recipient was willing to purchase the gifts, whereas many are unlikely to have bought them at all.

Nova Scotians will spend nearly $350 million on department store type merchandise in December alone, nearly twice the monthly average. November and December retail sales account for 25% of annual sales, and will include an estimated $240 million in holiday season purchases and gifts this year.

The problem is simply that most gift-givers often don’t know what their friends and relatives really want and need. The New Haven study found that the worst mismatches were in gifts by grandparents, followed closely by aunts and uncles, with recipients valuing the gifts well below what their relatives paid.

The New Haven results were applied to Nova Scotia by GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research group that is constructing an index of sustainable development for the province.

According to GPI Atlantic director, Ronald Colman, "the findings challenge us to look for less materialist ways to express our generosity and to manifest the holiday spirit. People have always had doubts about whether the commercialization of Christmas undermined the true holiday spirit. Now we also know it is actually wasteful."

Colman notes that the true cost of the loss is actually greater when the environmental consequences of over-consumption are considered. "The production and consumption of market goods uses precious resources and energy, and produces waste, none of which are fully counted and valued in our market statistics. So the true cost of excess spending is a lot more than the price we pay at the check-out counter."

The Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index (GPI), designated by Statistics Canada as a pilot project for the country, includes valuations of environmental quality and quality of life that are not captured in the standards economic growth statistics. "The GPI perspective," says Colman, "has always been that more spending doesn’t necessarily improve our quality of life, and is often costly."

Colman recommends that unless we’re sure that the gifts we buy will benefit the recipient, we can look for more creative ways of giving. "For example, we might identify where we think real benefit can occur — like the work that charities do, and then we could make a gift to the charity of our choice in the name of a friend or relative, that will help those in real need. I think that would express the holiday spirit at least as well as the purchase of expensive toys, gadgets and clothes, and produce a lot less waste. The New Haven study shows that it would also produce a lot more value for the money we spend."