Do you receive gifts on your birthday? 🎂
Back in the day, it felt like only close friends exchanged gifts. But now, those walls have kinda crumbled. Online stores offer gifting options and digital gifticons have multiplied. Plus, messengers and SNS broadcast your birthday. 🎉 Thanks to that, even friends I haven’t seen in ages send gifts, and I find myself gifting more often too. It’s not necessarily ‘better’ or ‘worse’—just a shift in trends.
Today, I want to chat about gifticons, as more than 50% of the gifts I receive are these. How about you? The overwhelming majority are ‘two coffees and a cake’ gifticons. Almost every café offers this deal, and most people gift it without much thought. Perhaps because cake = birthday, but to me, it’s the most awkward gift ever. 🎂
The ‘two coffees and a cake’ gifticon is so oddly structured that it’s tough to reconfigure the amount for other items. Whether it’s been designed that way or the intrinsic price of two coffees and a slice of cake is just awkward, who knows? Finding a similar-priced item is nearly impossible. Plus, I often chill solo in cafes, and nothing on the menu tempts me enough to spend extra. Even with a drink and a slice of cake, there’s always a bit of balance left, and I don’t feel like spending more. That’s why I have gifticons lying unused for almost a year. ☕🍰
Last birthday, I received a HappyCon (SPC’s gifticon) and was too lazy to even check where to use it. But as the expiration date loomed, I had to Google how to use it. A tip online said you could register it on the Happy Point app. After slowly installing the app and fumbling through, I scanned the barcode only to see:
‘This coupon cannot be used.’ 😅
Was it hand-drawn by my friend? Similarly, I once tried to figure out how to use a Lotte Cinema ticket, which also needed registration on their app. Downloading it, I scratched the sealed part to reveal the pin code, but nothing showed. Even shining a light or rubbing over it with a pencil didn’t help. Watching the pin code vanish like a secret mission was frustrating. It made me want to knock some sense into the ticket issuer. (Sorry for being too violent) It’s not like I’m activating a doomsday device with that pin! 🎬🔍
Of course, some folks might find gifticons surprisingly handy. After using them, they feel grateful to the sender, making the world a bit more beautiful. Maybe it’s that warmth causing global warming. Who knows? But for me, that’s a strong no. 🌎
No matter what, shouldn’t we think a bit more about choosing gifts that truly suit or are needed by the recipient? 🎁
You think coffee suits me? Ah… oh dear! ☕😅
Leave a Reply