Showing posts with label gift. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gift. Show all posts

Is This Being Cheap?

Please give me some feedback on this, I don't want to be cheap and I will do whatever is the right thing to do. Here's the situation:
 
Our team at work is planning on giving our boss a gift for Boss's Day on Monday. The person who usually gathers all the donations and gets the card is on vacation so I got together with with another gal and we decided that we would do something similar to what we've done in the past for the boss - give her a gift card and I put together a goodie bag of stuff from my stockpile. The boss loves these gifts as she's a more practical person like me, not into flowers and fashion. Anyway, this other person and I decided on a $25 gift card from the team, and I would put together a nice pink Publix bag of Olay, candles, cat food and treats, chocolate snacks and nuts, Gain detergent, pens, scissors, tape and hand soap. I have a free blank greeting card from Shutterfly with a nice flower picture on front that we can write whatever we want in it. We're asking each of the 8 people on the team for a $3 donation toward the gift card. I figured I would just pull a $25 Publix gift card from my stash and put it in the card. I also got one of those "Take Your Budget By the Horns" coupon booklets yesterday from the USF Store (you can still get them folks!) that have a $5 off $30 coupon each month through May 2012.
 
So, I called people on the team since we're located in three different facilities and I explained what we're doing and said I could get the $3 from each person at the remote sites at later times this month. So I have to front the money for the gift card, that's why I was just going to pull one from my stash and keep the cash as it came in.
 
Anyway, I was talking to another coworker on another team about what they're doing for their boss and I mentioned what we're doing. They all know I'm into couponing and have lots of stockpile stuff, but they still laugh about it. So, I said I was donating the product and putting together a bag of stuff and getting the $25 GC from my stash of them. Well, you would think I had said I was stealing it! This person I was talking to was appalled that I would take cash from coworkers and keep it. I asked what the difference was, either I take the cash to Publix and buy a gift card today, or just pay myself for the gift card. She doesn't really know that the gift card was a gift from doing a giveaway or from overage on previous shops, but it is.
 
As it is, all the people at my facility have paid up and I have only $12. I'll get $3 on Monday, and $6 more on Wednesday, and the final $3 on Halloween. So, if it is cheap to just use one of my own gift cards, I'll have to buy a gift card when I only have 1/2 the money - so I'll have to use one of my personal Publix gift cards plus the $12 to buy a $25 gift card. That just seems stupid to me. So there you have it, my dilemma of the day.
 
What would you do? 

Frugal Gift Bags

This year lots of family and friends will be getting Gift Bags of stuff rather than a single present. Some of our friends are unemployed or underemployed, or have had their hours cut back at work and just don't have the means to give lavishly. So for our gifts this year we're going to put everything in Publix re-usable bags that we've gotten free this fall with coupons. We'll put other items we got free or for less than a $1 so that by the time the bag is filled it will have a $50 or more value. This is what's going in the bag:

1. Arm & Hammer Toothpaste
2. Reach Toothbrush
3. Razor
4. Glade Fragrance Collection Candle
5. Glade plugin air freshner
6. Dog or Cat treats food
7. Candy bar
8. Fisher Fusion Nut Snack
9. Progresso Soup
10. Crackers
11. Alexa crunchy snack
12. Chinet plates and napkins
13. Infusium Shampoo or Conditioner
14. Snuggle Fabric softener or All Laundry Detergent
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