Wouldn't Aunt Gert see the charge reversed on her credit card statement? "Oh look," says Aunt Gert, "Homer sent that Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings the Beatles CD back to Amazon before they even mailed it! I guess he couldn't even let the goldurn thing in his house. What a gutless, passive-agressive son my sister raised!"

You get to keep the money, I believe, and put it toward something you like better.

As I have written, "At the root of manners is empathy" -- thinking about how your behavior would affect the other person. Well, if they don’t know, how are they harmed?

As long as you remember to send the thank you note for the *intended* gift...

"You get to keep the money, I believe, and put it toward something you like better."

All of which would have been clear if I'd, you know, actually read the article.

"Well, if they don’t know, how are they harmed?" Well, assuming they would never find out, I guess they wouldn't be. Of course, Aunt Gert could have avoided the problem of guessing Homer's tastes by getting him a gift card and being done with it.

I think it's fantastic. Too bad more gifts don't come to me from amazon.

As miss manners says, once the giver has given the gift it is yours to do with as you will, guilt free.

I think it's a great idea that will take years to adopt and become more accepted. I bought my wife a skirt, necklace, ring and estate piece pendant this year. She kept the necklace, the one piece I thought she might return, and returned the other three and bought stuff I wouldn't have. So I wasted a few hours and she probably had a brief moment of feeling guilty.

My friend Victoria has a teenage son who received an $80.00 video game from his grandmother he didin't want (the game, not grandma), but opened it anyway making it unreturnable.

Crid- maybe you and I should go in halfsies for Elton John's new baby? BTW- how does that work for gay guys? Do they both jerk off into the same petrie dish and leave it up to fate?

Miss Manners will have a conniption when she finds out.

From an etiquette perspective, it's not rude if the giver never finds out. My gift, I can do what I want with it.

Although most of the people who order stuff off of Amazon for me get me good gifts.

For me, gift-giving is enjoyable, when it's not a gift borne of obligation. I like thinking about what would be something somebody would get a little thrill out of, and then getting it for them.

Miss Manners will have a conniption when she finds out.

I would suspect she wouldn't. I like her because she's got a realistic approach to manners issues, where the Posties are saccharine and don't come at issues from as smart a place as Miss Manners.

When I give a gift its because I tried to think about what the receiver would like. Since I'm reasonable sure I don't always know, I'd love what Amazon's doing because then I can be sure the recipient is happy. That's really the end result I'm hoping for. I always ask people to tell me if they don't like something but realistically many won't, so I usually will put a gift receipt in with the gift when possible. It saves the potential awkward scenario of someone not really liking what I bought and not wanting to hurt my feelings.

I have a wishlist on Amazon that most people who buy gifts for me know about, so I don't know how much this would get used for me.

I think as long as the giver doesn't find out, it's probably okay.

My mother has finally gotten to the point she just sends me gift cards or checks. Along with a bunch of high sugar goodies.

I take the high sugar goodies and share them among co-workers. I never cash the checks. I have about 4 gift cards for restaurants I need to get around to using.

I'm single, make a good income, and just buy what I want when I want.

Interesting to see how the algorithm was broken down. A lot of the decision making can be handed off to the machines and automated. In my more cynical moments I contempate the difficulties of replacing people with general purpose computers so it'll be interesting to see how global the heuristics are. Perhaps in a year or so the machines can decide the giving end of the transaction too.

That's hilarious!

Speaking of gifts, here's one for you. My ex-wife sent me a three month supply of Rogaine, among other things, for Christmas. I'm not sure how to take that :)

'm not sure how to take that :)

Maybe she was done with it.

This seems useful to people in dealing with bad gift-givers they know. It also seems a bit dickish to me to blacklist people who, however misguidedly, are trying to do something nice. It's a bit of digitally-aided ungratefulness, but isn't something that will rend the fabric of our society.

But one aspect of this story is an example of something truly troubling: that something this conceptually simple – create a list, get email notifications if someone on that list sends you something, exchange potentially unwanted gift for wanted gift – merits patent protection. The willingness of USPTO to grant business process patents to such simple things is a boon to patent trolls and a hindrance to innovation and competition.

At first I thought that this system required you to create a gift blacklist comprised of individual items. This would be impractical as the list of things you don't want is presumably nearly infinitely long.

So I read the patent and the system has you enter rules for the types of gifts that you don't want based on product name, type, feature list, cost, timing, etc. For example, you could set up a rule to exclude CD's of Beatles covers in March that cost less than $50. Even so, you would still need a long list of very complex rules that might have unintended consequences (such as blocking gifts you actually want.)

The patent goes on to describe rules for converting the gift into either cash, a gift from your list, a gift card, or donating the gift value to charity. There are also rules for notifying the gift giver and telling them that you converted their gift.

All-in-all, a clever idea that can never work. I doubt that this will ever see the light of day.

Urgh. I'm probably in the minority here, but I find this to be kind of tacky. Even if the gift-giver never finds out (and how awkward will it be if they do?), the attitude behind this strikes me as basically saying, "I don't even want this piece of crap darkening my doostep, good intentions be damned! Just gimme the cash!" And I should add that I don't have a problem with someone regifting or exchanging something that I give to them. I'll give it my best effort, but the gift belongs to the recipient and they don't have to keep something they don't like or want. But in the wake of excessively greedy registries and wish lists, how much more demanding can you be of someone who thought enough of you to buy a gift?

I find the concept to be ungracious, IMHO.

Uh, JonnyT - the gift GIVER is also doing it through the internet, rather than shopping, wrapping, and writing out a card themselves... so what's so tacky?

Hi Ben. I'm not sure what you mean. I never expressed any misgivings over the transaction taking place through the Internet. My beef is with the idea that a potential gift recipient would be so bent on getting only exactly what they want, that the possibility of receiving something that might not be to their liking is seen as some kind of unbearable inconvenience. How it was purchased and presented makes no difference to me. I just find the concept of preemptively rejecting a gift to be crass.