gifts that you give for yourself

Everyone has heard the cheesy shopping line that talks about "the gift that keeps on giving." I generally equate this to a magazine subscription, but it's been used time and again for a number of products over the years.

I've also recently picked up on a new angle being pushed by marketers - gifts that you give someone else which are really gifts for yourself. While this gifting concept isn't new, marketers typically left it untouched over the years, aside from perhaps the granola bar marketing that states that "chewy stops the chatter". Some typical examples when it comes to Christmas shopping would be when you buy your wife a new piece of lingerie, or a nice set of cookware for the kitchen. Sure, it's a gift for her, but she'll be (hopefully) wearing that sexy new teddy for you, and if she can cook, you're bound to reap some benefits for gifting a new set of designer pots and pans. Granted, you could easily take the concept too far. For example, if you buy a housewife a new vacuum cleaner, you're probably asking for trouble.

Other uses of this gifting tactic include gifts from parents to their children that relieve the parents of child-induced noise and aggravation. We've already touched on the granola bar approach. iPods also come to mind, particularly for long roadtrips. My parents used this one with us, and it worked very well for our frequent trips to the beaches of Florida. You just need to make sure to stock up on batteries before you leave. It's not exactly a novel idea, but I would hope that by now American consumers would be past the whole "selfish" phase that got us into this economic mess, and that they might be reassessing what types of gifts are truly necessary and worthy of being called a "gift" for someone else. In fact, one might think that giving gifts during a recession is a rather ridiculous idea. Instead, wouldn't it make more sense to give the gift of time, especially when we're likely to be working more of it to pay our bills?