Ending Wedding Gifts

Doing something nice for your friends is, of course, lovely. Yet as currently constituted, the marital gift exchange is a barbarous relic: wasteful, unfair, and inefficient. It’s time to do away with the registry and this silly tradition.

Today, Matthew Yglesias argues that we should “just say no” to wedding gifts. Wedding gifts make the most sense, he argues, when a couple is moving in together for the first time and don’t own anything. Friends and family then buy them a bunch of stuff to prepare them for their new domestic life. But a lot of couples are coming from a more established place — some already live together and have whatever consumer goods they like to use, but use wedding gifts as a way to upgrade a bunch of their stuff. Wedding gifts are also not universal — plenty of people are choosing not to get married and will never receive wedding gifts, but are expected for etiquette reasons to buy gifts for those who do choose to get married. As an alternative, Yglesias offers up graduation as a good time to go all out with gift-giving because that’s when debt-laden young people are starting their “adult” lives, don’t really own much, and could probably really benefit from getting a really nice crockpot.

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