Rebecca Walker Reczek is a professor of marketing at The Ohio State University; Cory Haltman is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing a The Ohio State University i Grant Donnelly is an assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University.
If you find the right present and make sure that the recipient receives it on time leaves you feeling anxiousyou are not alone More than half of Americans say that the gift stresses them out.
Concerns about on-time delivery are so common that people share holiday deadlines for every shipping service. And in case you can’t meet those deadlines, there are now helpful etiquette guides that offer advice on how to inform the recipient.
If you’ve been sending gifts late thanks to shipping delays, out-of-stocks, or even good old-fashioned procrastination, our new research may offer some welcome news.
In a series of studies soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, we found that people overestimate the negative consequences of sending a late gift.
Trying to follow the rules
Why do people tend to overestimate these consequences? Our results indicate that when people give gifts, they pay more attention to the rules on gifts than the recipients.
For example, other researchers have found that people tend to be reluctant to give products used as gifts because there is a rule that gifts must be new. In reality, however, many people are often open to receiving used things.
We found that this mismatch also applies to beliefs about the importance of time. Many people worry that a late gift shows that they don’t care about the recipient. Then they fear their relationship will suffer.
In reality, however, these fears are largely unfounded. Gift recipients are much less concerned about when the gift arrives.
Unfortunately, aside from causing unnecessary worry, being overly sensitive about a late gift can also influence the gift you choose to buy.
Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images
Delay compensation
To test how worries about delay affect gift selection, we conducted an online study ahead of Mother’s Day in 2021. We had 201 adults participate in a raffle. They could choose to send their mother a cheaper gift basket that would arrive in time for the occasion or a more expensive one that would arrive late.
Concerns about delay led almost 70% of participants to choose the less expensive and faster option.
In another study, we conducted the same type of sweepstakes for Father’s Day and got similar results.
In addition to finding that people will choose inferior items to ensure faster delivery, we’ve also found that donors may feel they can make up for the delay with effort.
In another online study of 805 adults, we found that participants were less likely to expect a late birth to damage a relationship if they indicated their care for the recipient in a different way. For example, they believed that assembling an item by hand, rather than buying it pre-assembled, could compensate for a gift being delayed.
Better late than never?
If sending something late isn’t as bad as expected, you might wonder if it’s okay to not send anything at all.
We would warn that we do not follow this path.
In another online study of 903 participants, we found that recipients believed that receiving nothing was more likely to damage a relationship than receiving something up to two months late.
In other words, it’s better late than never for gift recipients.
You might want to keep this in mind, even if that new game console, action figure, or VR headset is sold out this holiday season. It could still be a welcome surprise if it arrives in January or February.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.