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I shopped for Christmas on Amazon, it was kind of a pain. I had to ship it all to myself, wrap it, put on gift notes and then pack it all up and ship it all to my family across the country. I was going to do their individual gift wrapping but it was $6 PER ITEM. Considering I got about 15 items, that really adds up.

I think I'll still do some shopping on there next year, I just wish they had cheaper gift wrapping and card options.

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"I shopped for Christmas on Amazon, it was kind of a pain. I had to ship it all to myself, wrap it, put on gift notes and then pack it all up and ship it all to my family across the country."

I'm struggling to understand how that is any more of a pain than trawling around town to find appropriate gifts, then completing those very same steps. And with Amazon, you at least have the option of their (admittedly overpriced and ugly) gift wrap.

> (overpriced and ugly)

My parents bought my daughter a present and got the gift wrapping option and it was this amazing blue velvet gift sack. We saved it so we can use it again it was so nice. In fact, for the $6 my parents paid, we couldn't get a bag that nice ourselves.

I guess my point is, YMMV.

Nice. I always assumed they used wrapping paper, but that makes a ton of sense given that time is the cost, a nice looking sack is clearly a much better idea.

I ordered something that came in a large box. I was expecting the sack like I've received in the past. Instead the box was partially gift wrapped with both ends exposed so you could see what was in it.

The biggest savings of Christmas shopping on Amazon is not having to go to a physical store to do the shopping. No driving around wasting hours in traffic, waiting in lines, and dealing with cranky people. The added benefit is that Amazon also usually has the thing you are looking for too. So if you add up all that time saved, time spent wrapping is really not that bad.

It's really the biggest saving of shopping online, period. I would pay a great deal more to not have to stand in a line and get stuck behind someone pulling out coupons and a checkbook and doing a price check at a checkout aisle in a store.

Physical stores can't even implement the obviously better solution of getting everyone in one queue, and then directing them to the next open register (except for TJ Maxx and Marshalls and a couple others)

Target was doing that during the liquidation sales in Canada (at least at the ones I was at). It's worth noting that I don't recall them doing that before they went belly-up.

I remember just dreading Christmas shopping before Amazon. Sitting in traffic jams on the way to the mall, driving around in circles for an hour waiting for someone to leave, then getting jostled by hordes of rude strangers while looking at products - would my mother like this chrome unicorn maybe not but I need to get the hell out of here before I punch somebody.

Wrapping is a cinch compared to all that.

Considering what USPS, FedEx, and UPS charge us plebes without a corporate account, I'm surprised you could even ship 5 packages for under $90 ($6*15), let alone all 15 items.

Not to mention the cost of standing in line. I spent 30min at the post office mailing a SINGLE package back in mid-December.. and I thought I was ahead of the christmas game!

Why would you stand in line at the post office to ship something? Buy and print the labels at home using something like Paypal's shipping url[0] if you don't have any idea about the weight use flat rate boxes. Fedex has a similar flat rate box shipping with their "OneRate" rates. Then all you are doing at the shipping place is dropping packages off so there is no line waiting.

[0] https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now

IIRC I needed some special service.

Once I was already there, and 'only' 10th in line, my time was pretty much sunk anyway.

The cost of reshipping + cost of wrapping + cost of time of wrapping is probably getting close to $6 an item.

That's a very good point.

The replies to this post are all quite analytical and focused on the value proposition gift wrapping gives you.

I know it's more expensive to do it myself, but it's one of the few things I'm truly terrible at, and my family/friends all seem to derive great joy from my lack of skill, so I have begun to enjoy it myself.

I guess if I were concerned about the value of the cost of having someone else gift wrap a present for me, I would be more concerned about why I didn't care enough to do it myself but felt the need to purchase something for them. The only gift wrapping I paid for was 10$, and from Rapha, a high end cycling clothing company - because they give you a fantastic magnetic closing box with special tissue wrapping on everything inside it. (and I still put the entire gift wrapped box in shitty target brand wrapping paper anyway)

How much time did it take for you to wrap it? I usually say for myself if I were paying myself minimum wage and it exceeds that then I rather pay someone else.

People usually would only be paid minimum wage for the hours they work in a day (~8). So just pretend you gift wrap after those hours, where you are paid $0/hr.

It is a way to measure if something is really expensive.

Another way to look at it is that $90 is about a regular night out. The choice is between investing 1 evening of your time to save for 1 night out later, or instead invest nothing but lose one night out that you need to spend in front of the TV.

YMMV, but probably the tipping point in GP specific situation is that he also had to post them all by himself, which is a huge pain and is probably alone worth it to have amazon do it.

That $90 wasn't just put into time spent wrapping. There is the (negligible) cost of the wrapping paper and the cost to re-ship them. If the cost of shipping was more then $6 per item...

I opted to have Amazon gift wrap and ship directly to my sister this year. The surprise was that what she opened was not what I ordered. I'm guessing they have a gift wrap station and once it was wrapped, it looked just like the other gifts, so the wrong one got put into the shipping box to my sister.

The return process does not handle this well.

$90 .. meh, a lot of people would see the value in that.

Problem is that Amazon's gift wrapping is crap. They just throw it into a blue felt bag and attach a gift note.

I've only seen the blue felt bag once, when buying my wife some (cheap) jewelry. For items big enough, they use plain blue wrapping paper. That's what I usually see. It seems like a perfectly adequate wrapping job to me -- certainly better than my notoriously uncoordinated self would do.

For the record, Amazon charged me 3.95 per item for gift wrapping. I don't know if it changes based on the size of the item, whether you're a Prime member (I am), or other factors. But it's not always $6.

For $6/item they should offer more choices on how it is to be wrapped. I would say at least 6-12 different kinds of paper.

I agree. I think a lot of people would feel more comfortable using a gift wrapping service if those same people could pick their own wrapping paper, which, in the end, would mean more $ for Amazon.

How would you handle that at the warehouse though? Amazon is all about efficiency.

robot.

My son received the game Operation for Christmas from his grandparents. That game came from Amazon in a blue felt bag.

My girlfriend gave my family presents. All presents (7+ ?) came in felt bags.

Maybe it has more to do with the warehouse of origin than the size of the item. Did they run out of paper and resort to bags? Is there some reason they'd use paper in one warehouse but bags in another? Perhaps one hasn't been fitted with the advanced paper-wrapping robot and it's quick to just drop it in a bag? It'd be really interesting to learn what dictates the wrapping material.

What I've seen for much larger items (projector) is a big blue bag.