# Gifts from the company catalogue-The Good, The Bad and The Ugly **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 26, 2025, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072 "2025-12-26T15:08:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/41 "2025-12-27T14:35:07Z")
For a while I may have helped kill off the anniversary gift catalog at my company. One year they stopped listing gift cards as an option, and I had a mini revolt in my department. It turned out that the catalog was listing the “gifts” at a very high MSRP compared to available online pricing, and my company was imputing that value as income…so, my folks were effectively buying a thing they may or may not have wanted at a discount, rather than getting a nice $ gift…which would still have been taxable, but cash is cash. (it was a very data-driven department, and I think they were (rightly) mad about cash disappearing) I brought all that to HR, and then for a while the catalog disappeared, and then they brought something back that had cash again. But then it changed again a couple of times, so who knows what they’re doing now. The whole thing is silly, and very few people like it. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/42 "2025-12-27T14:44:30Z")
Lol, i didn’t even realize that dreck was treated as taxable income. So i absolutely did the right thing by not selecting any of the options, and receiving no “gift”. I would have liked something of some vague sentimental value for the 25th, though, and I’m sad nothing was offered. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/43 "2025-12-27T15:00:11Z")
Huh. Some googling tells me that this type of award _ought_ to be excludable from imputed income. This leaves a couple of interesting possibilities: - my company, very conservative, took a conservative legal line on treatment of that income - my department had it wrong (or those specific people had it wrong), and they were just pissed about cash gift cards disappearing from the catalog. I do know HR never came back to tell me my question was incorrect. But then, it’s HR. This was all earliest 2000s…I wish I remembered better, but I’m going with option 2. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/44 "2025-12-27T15:29:06Z")
They gave the gift, but you didn’t redeem it, which might make it taxable income. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/45 "2025-12-27T15:30:13Z")
It never showed up as taxable income on my paycheck. Other things i didn’t take possession of, like money i have to charity through payroll deductions, did show up. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/46 "2025-12-27T16:01:15Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > For my 25th anniversary, half the stuff available was watches. One was a lower-quality version of a nice Garmin watch i had purchased for myself a few years earlier. None was actually gold or had any resale value. Oh, yeah - we had a choice of an endless selection of very samey-looking Bulova watches (the less expensive end of the line at that). They plus an assortment of inexpensive jewelry were easily more than half the catalog. I’m sure somebody must have occasionally selected one of those, but I certainly never met anyone who did. I have always been pleased that phones liberated us from them. Among the more blue and grey-collar folks I worked with most a portable air compressor was a common choice. And I just now remembered my 15 yr gift - a set of glasses (I think beer + shot)! ---
**Author:** ![SunUp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea5d25/32.png) [@SunUp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SunUp)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/47 "2025-12-27T16:26:01Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > I brought all that to HR, and then for a while the catalog disappeared, and then they brought something back that had cash again. So for a gift from your company catalogue, you really wanted A Fistful of Dollars - and given the tax effects, you asked for A Few Dollars More? I think I see where this thread is going… ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/48 "2025-12-27T16:52:53Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Lol, i didn’t even realize that dreck was treated as taxable income. So i absolutely did the right thing by not selecting any of the options, and receiving no “gift”. Neither did I and while I easily could have missed it, I don’t think that they did for us nor for the occasional $100 gift card as a bonus. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/49 "2025-12-27T16:59:50Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > > [@puzzlegal](#): > > > > Lol, i didn’t even realize that dreck was treated as taxable income. So i absolutely did the right thing by not selecting any of the options, and receiving no “gift”. > > Neither did I and while I easily could have missed it, I don’t think that they did for us nor for the occasional $100 gift card as a bonus.   It may well depend on the amount involved and the tax rules of a particular jurisdiction. In the case of our Hawaii vacation, (a) I was informed ahead of time that it would be a taxable benefit, (b) I was informed that I’d be compensated for the tax liability, and (c) yes, the putative taxable value of the trip did appear on my income tax form. But the company’s compensation was more than adequate to make up for the tax liabilities. It would be pretty low to give someone an award with monetary value and then force them to pay extra taxes for it! ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/50 "2025-12-27T17:05:31Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > Neither did I and while I easily could have missed it, I don’t think that they did for us nor for the occasional $100 gift card as a bonus. From the IRS site: > **[De minimis fringe benefits | Internal Revenue Service](https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-governments/de-minimis-fringe-benefits)** > > Information about taxation of occasional benefits of minimal value. Over $100 is usually not considered _de minimis_ BUT: > [@](#): > > Achievement awards > Special rules apply to allow exclusion from employee wages of certain employee achievement awards of tangible personal property given for length of service or safety. These awards > > Cannot be disguised wages > Must be awarded as part of a meaningful presentation > Cannot be cash, cash equivalent, vacation, meals, lodging, theater or sports tickets, or securities. > In addition, there are other requirements specific to achievement and safety awards and there are dollar limitations that must be met. See Publication 5137, Fringe Benefit Guide or Publication 535 PDF for more information. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/51 "2025-12-27T17:12:15Z")
In my 25+ year career in tech I’ve gotten plenty of company “Schwag” though never heard of it given for time served. Vast majority being t-shirts. The coolest were the various video game tshirts I got in my time at Activision. I had an Ironman tshirt (before the Marvel movie, we were actually working on the game for the Sony movie that was cancelled when Marvel took it over) I had never heard of Ironman at the time but people would stop me on the street and complement me in how cool it was. When I first started in tech I thought it was dumb and nerdy (I used to mock my friends if they wore company clothing to the pub). Now free company shirts and hoodies are about half of what I wear 😉 ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/52 "2025-12-27T18:08:52Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Also, by my 25th, a lot of my friends had retired, and my boss had no idea who my remaining friends at the company were. So i also got a card signed by about 6 people. It was incredibly depressing. I decided they may have set it up that way on purpose, to encourage old workers to retire. One of the standard retirement gifts every pilot gets is a ~3x~4 foot framed print of a painting of your aircraft type in company livery. There’s a very wide white mat all around the image. With a small gold engraved plaque centered below with your name and employment dates. Kinda like a headstone for your career. :eek: As you got down to your last month or two, your print would be set out on a dedicated table in the communal pilot office / flight planning area where everybody came through at the start and end of every trip. And folks who knew you would sign your mat with some kind of cheery send-off, like the grown-up version of signing a high school or college yearbook. It was actually a pretty neat idea. Back in the day most of these prints were just covered with sigs and well wishes by the time the owner’s retirement rolled around. The really well-known or well-liked people ended up with sigs festooning most of the clouds in the image, as there was nowhere else left to sign. Then over a few years, say 2018-2022, we switched all our personnel admin and flight planning processes to be online and in your issue iPad. Now nearly nobody ever visits that office except to take a mid-day break out of sight of the passengers. The number of sigs & well wishes per print has collapsed to more or less the managers & office staff plus a couple of extra pilots who do it as a personal project, wishing well to retirees they may never have met. So sad. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/53 "2025-12-27T18:42:40Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > One of the standard retirement gifts every pilot gets is a ~3x~4 foot framed print of a painting of your aircraft type in company livery. There’s a very wide white mat all around the image. With a small gold engraved plaque centered below with your name and employment dates. Kinda like a headstone for your career. :eek: That’s a standard thing at large engineering companies as well but it’s a picture of the building where you worked which would have the company logo on it. Same with the signatures and the big white margins. I retired in March 2020 when covid was really taking off and most of the staff worked from home. Pretty much everyone who didn’t work on the actual manufacturing lines wasn’t there so I didn’t get to say goodbye to most of my long time colleagues nor did anyone bother to make one of those pictures for me. There was another long time engineer retiring on the same day. Both of use were well known and popular (him more than I) and we were going to get a big party. Kind of a fizzle to the end of a career but I would have politely taken the picture and thrown it out once it spent a respectable amount of time in a closet. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/54 "2025-12-27T18:48:59Z")
Ouch. COVID screwed up a lot of milestone events for a lot of people. Births, religious coming-of-age, graduations, marriages, retirements, deaths; the whole lot had to make do with little or none of the typical public fanfare. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/55 "2025-12-27T19:04:24Z")
I have to say that as a great fan of flight in general, I love these anecdotes of your pilot career. In another thread, on a different topic, you described the process of the final moments of landing a jetliner, flaring very gently while pulling back on the throttle. These are the sorts of details unknown to normal mortals and that we of the curious type deeply appreciate. On a completely different topic, I’m typing this on the new laptop with the fucking newfangled “chicklet” keyboard and making typos all over the place! ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/56 "2025-12-27T19:10:23Z")
My old company has that thing (I assume this is common now) where they solicit online anniversary congratulations and then it’s printed and sent to them. The person who took over my department still forwards those to me from time to time and I drop in a congratulations and note…I’m appreciative she still includes me. Also, when I retired at the end of 2019, I started mostly working from home in the back half of the year, so they sent around a book people could sign. I appreciated that touch, though now I’m not 100% sure what to do with it…I’d feel bad tossing it, but I don’t read it either. ---
**Author:** ![romansperson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/romansperson/32/17100_2.png) [@romansperson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/romansperson)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/57 "2025-12-27T19:13:09Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > So no one here received a gold watch? That was the stereotypical retirement gift. I got a crystal clock that weighs about 10 pounds. So something that tells time, at least. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/58 "2025-12-27T19:30:05Z")
The only time that I received a service gift was when I worked for a very large ad agency in the 2000s. For my five-year anniversary, I got a small Sony Trinitron television for our bedroom, which we mostly used to watch DVDs. That was in 2005, just before CRT televisions went the way of the dinosaur, and flat screens became the norm, so the silly thing (probably a 13" screen) was deeper than it was wide. A couple of years ago, I briefly worked for a company which gave a $1000 shopping trip to the local Tiffany store as a five-year gift, but that place had tremendous employee churn, and fairly few people made it to five years (my job was eliminated when I’d been there for only nine months). ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/59 "2025-12-27T20:16:25Z")
This has been an entertaining read. I work for a nonprofit, so I guess I should be grateful for my anniversary plaques. Just got my 10-year last month. We do occasionally get logo-emblazoned SWAG but most of the time we have to pay for it, or win it somehow. The coolest thing we ever got from employee council was a legitimately awesome double-decker bento box. Dishwasher safe. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072/60 "2025-12-27T20:23:16Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > We do occasionally get logo-emblazoned SWAG but most of the time we have to pay for it, or win it somehow. When I worked for Quaker Oats, in the late '90s (just before they got swallowed up by Pepsico), they had a huge catalog of Quaker-branded apparel and merchandise which you could order, as well as regularly giving away branded clothes and tchotchkes to employees. There was a lot of company loyalty and enthusiasm among its employees back then, and it was really common to see people wearing company-branded shirts and sweaters at work. I also bought a Quaker-branded Lionel toy train, which the Quaker employee activity committee had commissioned, and which you needed to be a Quaker employee to purchase. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gifts-from-the-company-catalogue-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/1026072.md?page=4)