In no particular order:
- cash
- denarii
- euros
- yen
- rupees
- shekels
- rubles
- pesos
- yuan
- greenbacks
Ordinarily I am a gift card kind of girl, the lazy man-shopper’s dream. Buy me a gift card and give me a day off and I am a happy camper. But here lately gift cards seem to be an iffy proposition at best. You just never know if the company you got a gift certificate/card from is going to close up shop and deny you. All those reports you hear about large percentages of gift cards never being redeemed? Yeah, not likely from where I sit. But better safe than sorry, I guess. At any rate, cash works just as well.
I realize that there is a certain contingent of people in this world — and in my life — who can’t wrap their minds around giving gift cards. They seem to think of it as giving up or giving in, a lack of imagination or a fit of laziness. Hey, I know I’m not easy to buy for. I don’t really want a whole lot, and the stuff I do want tends to be high-dollar stuff. I’m particularly fond of gadgets. Gadgets that tend to be pricey.
Few people know me well enough to really know what to buy for me. Even my mother gets it wrong every so often. And my husband? Bah. No clue. But they can give me cash and I’m fine with that. Really. Very fine with that.
I just wish my inlaws would make it easy on themselves and go that route. My mother-in-law loves to buy for people but our tastes could not be more divergent. She really knows nothing about me, and never has really made the effort to find out. So I get a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit, either size-wise or taste-wise, and I spend a day or two going around returning stuff after the holidays. Thank goodness she gives gift receipts with the gifts. Except where she buys stuff, when they take a return, they generally want to keep that money and in order to do that they will give me store credit. As much as I would like to walk away with cash in hand, it rarely happens. And I can pretty well tell you that it would take a long time for me to ever spend any money at Sears.
Cash is always the right size and the right color.
— Mox
Middleground 