Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Buy That Personal Touch

Via Marginal Revolution...... Are you no good at gift wrapping but don't want to let on that someone else did it? In the UK you can go here.

Firebox.com is paying 20 of its male forklift truck drivers and warehouse assistants to wrap presents as quickly as possible, using ugly brown duct tape and very little care. And the $9 service, cheekily called CrapWrap, has attracted more than 500 customers since it launched last week. Whether it's a book, DVD or something trickier such as a kitchen utensil, the team guarantees to make a mess of it.

I can imagine expanding this to personal shopping. Rather than hiring the typical personal shopper who would find a perfect gift that the recipient would know you didn't pick out, you could hire someone with similar questionable taste who would buy something you would buy.

2 comments:

Dale said...

Sure, sure, but it seems self-defeating doesn't it? The tediousness of gift-wrapping comes from the perceived need to make it look neat. If you don't need to make it look neat, then you can just blast through it and call it done as soon as you can no longer see anything revealing of the gift. Why pay for that?

But I am glad if this makes sloppy-looking gift-wrapping more respectable.

Mike said...

Dale, it's pretty much based on deception, isn't it? But that's to be expected during the celebration of an event that even most of it's supporters acknowlege didn't actually take place during this time of year.