Tis the Season to Return or Exchange Unwanted Gifts

By brwood (view all posts by brwood)
at 9:57AM Tuesday December 28, 2010
under Shop Smarter

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and an early Happy New Year to you! As we all sit back and reflect on the year that was, and make plans to have a better one, we may be missing the perfect opportunity to start making it great right now. I'm talking about taking advantage of loosened after-holiday return policies to get the things you really want.

Now I'm certainly not advocating you do anything dishonest, like returning a Blu-ray player your toddler tried to play a Ritz cracker in six months ago, but this is the season to return all the ugly and unwanted items you may have accumulated over the past year. Strike while the iron is hot people, you only really have about two weeks after Christmas before things go back to normal.

SavingsMommie recently ran down five options of what to do with unneeded, unwanted or duplicate children's toys and much of it also applies to other items as well, as you will see.

I'm usually against going to big retailers between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, but there really is no other alternative. Few online retailers offer free shipping on returns, and you'd have to know where the gift giver had ordered it to make it work anyway. Plus after New Years many have gone back to their normal return policies.

So that means going to the store and waiting in line. But if 30 minutes of standing on line can change an electric back scratcher into an MP3 player it'd be worth it, right? The way a friendly customer service rep can change "Earth (The Book)" by Jon Stewart in to "Broke" by Glen Beck or vice-versa is nearly magic.

Last week I wrote about retailers offering Buy Online Pick Up In Store (aka "BOPUIS) and there are also many buy online return in store options, though there isn't an acronym for it (BORIS?). Again there is no definitive list that I can find online, but you can assume that retailers offering BOPUIS will also honor BORIS. Though many, like Target, may only accept returns of items normally stocked in their stores not every item that can be ordered off their website. But this really doesn't matter, because the few weeks after Christmas you can exchange just about anything at any retailer that offers that item for sale, you just need to find a store that sells it.

It's an after Christmas Miracle!

You can make a best guess on where many things were bought, and just walk in and exchange it for something you do want. Walmart will let you do up to three "no receipt" returns a year and Target will let you do it twice. You will only get refunded the lowest price it recently sold for, but that's better than having something you don't want, right? Walmart will even give you cash back on items that sold for less than $25.

That means it's possible to turn the Bill O'Reilly book your grandfather gave you into a bottle of champagne for New Years. So pack up all the gifts that didn't hit their mark--even birthday gifts from six months ago--as well as things you may have bought yourself after a late night binge of rum, Mr. Pibb and internet shopping--and try your luck at your local big box retailer. You can usually get a good idea whether or not they carry an item from their web site. Just remember DVDs, CDs, and software that have been opened are extremely hard to return. So resist the temptation to play "Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge" like Bart did, before exchanging it for "Bonestorm."

Now suppose you got inappropriate gift cards? Maybe you got one for the Olive Garden and you're on a low carb diet or the Apple store and you build your own systems from discarded NASA surplus. Thanks to the powers of the internet, there's a solution for that, too.

Many sites have sprung up recently that offer peer to peer trading, online exchange, or even cash back. Here's a gift card exchange site list with some reviews. Now of course you aren't going to be able to sell a $50 Applebees gift card for $50; the exchange rate varies based on how in demand the cards are. It looks like the typical rates are about 70-90% of face value. Plastic Jungle tells me they will give me $41 in my PayPal account for that Applebees card, $44 if it was from the Apple Store.

Another great feature of these sites is the ability to buy gift cards discounted up to 30%. With a little planning you could use that discount to leverage a major purchase and get an awesome deal. Gift Card Rescue has Best Buy cards at 6% off, so find that killer sale price, and then pay with a discounted gift card to save another 6%. Many of these are online gift card codes, so you can use them instantly.

Hopefully one or more of my suggestions will help you and you can exchange your "didn't get the gift you wanted" frown for an "awesomest Christmas ever" grin.