Merchandising: The Business of Giving

While his wife got started on the family Christmas shopping last week, many an executive scanned a lengthy gift list of his own. Corporate gift giving to contacts and customers, out of favor in recent years after “payola” worked its way into the business lexicon, has been revived by prosperity, the passage of time, and a 1963 Internal Revenue ruling that allows business deductions for gifts of no more than $25 in value. This year, company Christmas purchases are expected to rise 9% and account for the largest part of the $325 million yearly business in corporate gifts.

A few large corporations—General Electric, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank—enforce written rules against receiving gifts. Other companies suggest that presents be passed on to the Salvation Army or a similar charity, and some just send them back unopened. But throughout U.S. business, executive Santas—and happy recipients —are still more common than not. The main concession to the gift-giving uproar of a few years back is that many more gifts are quietly routed to homes instead of to offices.

Wines & Artichokes. Brown & Bigelow, whose salesmen start Christmas rounds in March, this year will write $5,000,000 worth of orders for Christmas presents. Honeywell has set up a special division that offers twelve kinds of gifts for executives seeking something different. A Food Fair Stores subsidiary called Choice Gifts Inc. has 500 corporate clients in whose name it distributes seven catalogues, from which a recipient selects a gift without ever seeing a price tag. Manhattan’s Mark Cross and Dunhill have both set up corporate gift departments; so has Tiffany, which does $1,000,000 worth of business annually in executive gifts.

Alcoholic beverages are given more than any other gift, but tastes are becoming sophisticated. Where once the gift was a predictably expensive bottle of Scotch or bourbon, this year it is more likely to be a bottle or case of Chateau Haut-Brion or -Chateau La-fite-Rothschild. Wines have increased in a decade from 10% of Christmas orders to 35%, according to Samuel

Aaron, president of Manhattan’s Sherry Wine & Spirits Co., Inc.

For companies who discreetly proscribe bottled cheer but want to reach the recipient through taste buds, there are Southern hams, Texas pecans, or fruits packed by more than a dozen Florida and California growers. Santa Clara’s Day & Young, Inc. offers a “Royal Feast” that costs $21.95 and includes two smoked pheasants, two cheeses and four jars of marinated artichoke hearts. Busiest fruit packer of all is 64-year-old “Harry & David” of Medford, Ore., whose business annually exceeds $10 million and whose corporate orders often total $25,000 at a clip.

“Fondling Pieces.” Naturally, a plethora of stereotyped gifts is available: pen sets, leather-tooled engagement calendars, letter openers, diaries, rulers, cigarette lighters and ashtrays. San Francisco’s Gump’s is doing a big corporate business in “fondling pieces,” otherwise useless hunks of jade that come in a suede pouch (price: $8.25). This year executives can also give and get desk-scale Rolls-Royce radiators, fused into everything from paperweights to cigar lighters to book ends.

That is only the beginning of the snob-appeal gifts. Tiffany’s fastest individual seller is a sterling-silver money clip that costs $3.50. Hammacher Schlemmer offers “Worldtemp” cuff links that register centigrade temperatures on one link and Fahrenheit on the other. Honeywell’s $39.95 fishing thermometer comes with 60 ft. of line and a gauge showing which fish bite best at various water temperatures. For $99.50, Abercrombie & Fitch will gift-wrap an instrument that simultaneously tells temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, time of day and day of the week. And for the man who has every thing, and ran hard to get it, there is an executive foot massager, available at Manhattan’s B. Altman & Co. for $9.95.