As many of you know, Accent on Books offers free gift-wrapping for your purchases with us, a service an increasing number of customers will no doubt take advantage of over the next several days. Lewis actually got his start in retail as a gift-wrapper, so he has it down to a science as well as an art. Byron and Rebecca obviously have a strong aptitude for it as well. As for me, well, I'm glad most of our products are rectangular objects with flat surfaces, so they don't pose too much of a challenge.
While we offer several gift-wrapping options, we can't match the choices offered by Firebox.com, an online British retailer. For a fee, they will wrap your purchases in one of the following choices: Christmas, Gold, Silver, Stars, Stripes, or CrapWrap.
Say what?
That last choice is not a typo. If you so desire, Firebox will be happy to intentionally wrap your gift in a horribly incompetent manner. As they describe it: "Too much offensive brown tape, untidily hacked at wrapping paper, rips in the packaging exposing the surprise underneath."
Which of course leads to the question: Why would anyone, outside of sheer contrariness, pay good money to knowingly have a gift wrapped in an appalling manner? One suggestion that has been made: it's a boon for lazy guys. Under this theory, if a guy gives his wife/girlfriend/whomever a beautifully wrapped gift, the recipient will automatically assume the guy had someone else wrap it, and thus they may also assume he didn't put much thought into the entire gift-buying process. Whereas, if the wrapping job is lousy, the recipient may think, "Aw, he even wrapped it himself. How sweet."
I wonder if the Firebox gift-wrapping department has any job openings....
More on this retailing innovation can be found here.
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