It’s about demonstrating both that you know the person well enough to pick something they’ll like, and, probably more importantly, that you’re willing to put in the time and thought to select it and deliver it.
By the way, that effort means the recipient has to be in a relatively small hand-picked circle, no matter how rich you are. A gift picked by your personal assistant is not an acceptable substitute if the relationship is one of genuine intimacy and affection (as opposed to one of the many quasi-business relationships where you use what may look to the naive like insincere signals of intimacy and/or affection).
Also, a lot of people legitimately like to be surprised. If you’re really lucky, you find something that the person will like that they didn’t even know existed. But that’s very much extra credit.
I strongly suspect that cash and a handmade card would actually work OK for most people, especially if the card had something personal about it. On the other hand, I think a lot of people would find it pretty creepy if you started explicitly enumerating all the things you knew about them. That removes potentially useful ambiguity and is likely to lead you into Not Done territory.
This all makes a lot more sense if you remember that the gift is unlikely to be all that valuable. It’s probably not going to be something the recipient couldn’t afford anyway, so getting it wrong isn’t that big a deal; at least you still demonstrated the effort. If a single gift is big enough to really affect the finances or lifestyle of either the giver or the recipient, it’s likely to actually be negotiated ahead of time. Which is a process with its own etiquette… and where different people have differing expectations about what that etiquette is. For some people, said etiquette may include not overtly mentioning that you’re negotiating.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that your polls correlated with all of that. Perhaps Indonesians give a lot of relatively big gifts that are supposed to actually loom large (“Here’s a new washing machine”), and/or a lot of gifts to business associates or other people with whom they have “formal” relationships, whereas Danes give a lot of small tokens of affection (“Here’s a box of cookies I thought you’d like”), and mostly to people they actually interact with on a regular basis.
It does tend to break down when people get comfortable enough, and/or have their lifestyles fine-tuned enough, that storing and/or maintaining a gift starts to be a burden. Older people, especially, may sincerely prefer that you not give them anything, or at least not anything they won’t use up.
It’s about demonstrating both that you know the person well enough to pick something they’ll like, and, probably more importantly, that you’re willing to put in the time and thought to select it and deliver it.
By the way, that effort means the recipient has to be in a relatively small hand-picked circle, no matter how rich you are. A gift picked by your personal assistant is not an acceptable substitute if the relationship is one of genuine intimacy and affection (as opposed to one of the many quasi-business relationships where you use what may look to the naive like insincere signals of intimacy and/or affection).
Also, a lot of people legitimately like to be surprised. If you’re really lucky, you find something that the person will like that they didn’t even know existed. But that’s very much extra credit.
I strongly suspect that cash and a handmade card would actually work OK for most people, especially if the card had something personal about it. On the other hand, I think a lot of people would find it pretty creepy if you started explicitly enumerating all the things you knew about them. That removes potentially useful ambiguity and is likely to lead you into Not Done territory.
This all makes a lot more sense if you remember that the gift is unlikely to be all that valuable. It’s probably not going to be something the recipient couldn’t afford anyway, so getting it wrong isn’t that big a deal; at least you still demonstrated the effort. If a single gift is big enough to really affect the finances or lifestyle of either the giver or the recipient, it’s likely to actually be negotiated ahead of time. Which is a process with its own etiquette… and where different people have differing expectations about what that etiquette is. For some people, said etiquette may include not overtly mentioning that you’re negotiating.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that your polls correlated with all of that. Perhaps Indonesians give a lot of relatively big gifts that are supposed to actually loom large (“Here’s a new washing machine”), and/or a lot of gifts to business associates or other people with whom they have “formal” relationships, whereas Danes give a lot of small tokens of affection (“Here’s a box of cookies I thought you’d like”), and mostly to people they actually interact with on a regular basis.
It does tend to break down when people get comfortable enough, and/or have their lifestyles fine-tuned enough, that storing and/or maintaining a gift starts to be a burden. Older people, especially, may sincerely prefer that you not give them anything, or at least not anything they won’t use up.