Sending a late gift isn’t as bad for relationships as you think

If choosing the right present and ensuring it arrives by the big day makes you feel on edge, you’re far from alone. More than half of people in the United States report that giving gifts leaves them feeling stressed.

Worries about deliveries turning up on time are so widespread that shoppers swap festive cut-off dates for each delivery company. And if you miss those deadlines, there are now practical etiquette guides explaining how to let the recipient know.

If your presents have arrived late because of courier hold-ups, items selling out or plain old procrastination, our latest research offers some reassuring news.

Across a set of studies due to appear soon in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, we found that people tend to exaggerate how badly it will go down when a gift turns up late.

Trying to follow norms

So why do givers often assume a late present will have bigger downsides than it actually does? Our results suggest that when people buy gifts, they focus much more on gifting “rules” and social norms than recipients do.

To give one example, previous research shows that many givers hesitate to give second-hand items because there’s a strong norm that presents should be new. In practice, however, plenty of people are quite happy to receive used items.

We found the same kind of mismatch when it comes to timing. Many givers fear that a late gift will be read as a sign they don’t care about the recipient, and they worry that the relationship will be harmed as a result.

In reality, those concerns are largely misplaced. People receiving gifts tend to care far less about exactly when the present arrives.

And while this sensitivity creates unnecessary anxiety, it can also shape what people decide to buy.

Compensating for lateness

To examine how delivery timing worries affect gift choice, we ran an online study ahead of Mother’s Day in 2021. We recruited 201 adults to take part in a raffle. Each participant could choose to send their mother either a lower-priced gift basket that would arrive in time for the occasion, or a higher-priced basket that would arrive late.

Because participants were concerned about lateness, almost 70 percent selected the cheaper option that would be delivered sooner.

We then ran a similar raffle study for Father’s Day and saw much the same pattern.

Beyond showing that people may pick a worse gift simply to guarantee faster delivery, we also found evidence that givers believe effort can make up for lateness.

In a further online study with 805 adults, we found that participants were less likely to think a late delivery would damage a relationship if the giver demonstrated care in another way. For instance, they believed that assembling an item by hand, rather than buying it already assembled, could offset the fact that the present arrived late.

Better late than never?

If a late delivery isn’t as damaging as many people expect, you might ask whether it’s acceptable to skip the gift altogether.

We’d advise against that approach.

In another online study involving 903 participants, we found that recipients thought receiving nothing at all was more likely to harm a relationship than receiving a gift as much as two months late.

In other words, from the recipient’s perspective, late is better than never.

That’s worth remembering even if the new gaming console, action figure or virtual reality headset you want to buy is out of stock this festive season. It may still feel like a lovely surprise if it turns up in January or February.

Rebecca Walker Reczek, Professor of Marketing, The Ohio State University; Cory Haltman, Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing, The Ohio State University, and Grant Donnelly, Assistant Professor of Marketing, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.