Christian Weddings

Returning Unwanted Gifts

Hey ladies. I wanted to get your opinions on this.

My pastor's son created an organization where they turn unwanted gifts into donations to Blood Water Mission to fund wells in Africa. The way it works is that you fill out an internet form to request a prepaid shipping label. Then you take the label and use it to send an unwanted gift to them to be sold. They take the proceeds and donate them to the Blood Water Mission.

He and a friend created this organization and website after Christmas last year. But I think it could work for birthday gifts, wedding gifts and other occasions. 

What do you think of this? Would you ever see yourself using something like this? I was think that if I had known about an organization when I got married, I probably would have used it to donate some of the wedding gifts I received. But I was wondering what everyone's thoughts were. Would you feel comfortable returning some of your gifts to a store if you didn't think you were going to use them (or if you are already married, did you return some things)? Or would you feel comfortable doing something like this to turn the gifts into a donation?

Here is the website if you want to check it out:


(It's still so new that they are trying to figure things out. Any feedback would be appreciated. Hopefully as time goes on, they can refine the process and grow this organization to help more people.)
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Re: Returning Unwanted Gifts

  • I actually think it's a really great idea.  Especially for those gifts that people got you that were kind of duplicates, but not on a registry, so you don't have a receipt (or registry #) for them to return them anyway.
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  • I would have loved to have an organization like that to donate to. We ended up yard saling a few of our gifts that we didn't return. (Either because we now live too far away from the store, or because we didn't know where it came from.)  I didn't care about the monetary value, I just hoped someone else could use it more than me.
  • This is really sad, and sounds really, really ungrateful, but H and I got so many bad gifts whose origin was unknown that we kept a GoodWill box going as we opened gifts.  Things like the plaster birdfeeder meant to hang on the side of the house, personalized ceramic pie plate that was very downhome/folksy looking (not our style AT ALL), etc. went straight into that box and we dropped it off on our way home (we opened at my parents' house).

    We did return a few things, mostly because they were duplicates.  A couple of things got returned because there were some UPC issues where we scanned one item, and that item showed on our registry, but at a store in another part of the state the UPC corresponded to a different item.  Weird, huh?  Anyway, I feel better about actually returning things than donating. 

    The only problem I can see with their idea (which is really innovative) is if something is really heavy and the person chooses for them to do a prepaid label, they could end up even losing money on the item.
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