Years 5, 10 and 15 - I think it was initially just some variant of plaque + pin for the first two. Probably there was something more at 15, but for the life of me I don’t recall. Whatever it was didn’t leave an impression. So thereafter chosen from catalogs when applicable from a wide assortment of useless junk and/or not-bad-but-I-already-have-a-better-one :
Year 20 - small leather duffle bag (small for a duffle bag, but a medium-sized bag). Year 25 - Briggs and Riley medium-sized soft spinner suitcase. Year 30 - Mission-style faux-Tiffany stained glass table lamp. This one, which looks like it has been discontinued. Maybe they got a discount on it at remainder . Retirement gift - two Yeti Rambler 20 oz travel mugs.
I missed my 35th by a couple of months. No, it was not worth it to me to hang on for another gift . But in general, eh, no complaints I guess. I didn’t make out like a bandit, but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. One thing I noticed was that between my 25th and 30th anniversary, is that they switched gift vendors to one offering cheaper gifts at every anniversary level .
My favorite was when the small-ish company I worked for (a few hundred people) decided, in view of having had a remarkable year, to give out outerwear jackets. They had our names stitched into them, so they could get a tax break by calling them uniforms.
Hubby selected 4 old-fashioned glasses with the company logo for his 5th anniversary. Somebody got confused and he ended up with 2 sets.
In the 30 years in between the logo’s changed, and only one of the glasses has survived.
It used to be at 25 years, you could choose between a watch, company shares or extra vacation, plus cash. They increased the cash and got rid of the other options.
I think I got a gift card at 5 years. 10 years I got to pick something out of the gift catalogue and I ended up with a nice Sharper Image massager gun. It’s not something I would have thought to buy for myself and I do get a lot of use out of it. Haven’t quite made it to 15 yet.
Working for the feds I got a pin every 5 years, and IIRC a coffee cup.
My wife just got from her grocery store a set of diamond earrings- okay, a tenth of a carat, but they still look nice.
When i worked at Schwab they had pretty nice stuff. There was stuff even not at 5 year anniversaries, like just a Christmas, etc. But all Schwab branded, The briefcase was quite decent.
I worked for a place that had one of those crappy catalogs. Other than a company branded watch, everything was crap and generic and I bet a lot of medium sized companies used the same catalog. Gifts got progressively better for each five year anniversary. I don’t even remember what it was for five. For ten I got a big set of mid range Black and Decker tools. About half of them were improvements over what I already had. I gave away the rest. I retired six months before the fifteen year mark.
Besides a gift from the catalog, the other retirement perk from AT&T was $500 towards an “event”, most often used for a dinner of some sort. I took 3 friends to The Marine Room in La Jolla and enjoyed a nice meal at sunset.
I think I’ve told this story on here before. In the 80s the company my dad worked for decided to reward points for sales, and then they could spend the points on items in a catalog. Sort of exactly like how kids might get scammed work selling magazines for points to buy a pocket knife. Fortunately this was in addition to their normal commission.
The year they did that my dad was national salesman of the year (thanks Ronald Reagan defense spending!), and he had more points than we knew what to do with.
I used my kid’s sized share of the points to buy a CD player, VCR, portable stereo, and maybe some other stuff. I don’t remember what anyone else in the family chose. Worked out well, particularly the VCR, which was my only VCR for the entire life that format.
Being a Federal employee, we didn’t get gifts. But we did get pins every 5 years. I missed my 15 year pin because I didn’t know about it, but I’ve got 20, 25, 30, and 35. Years 5 & 10, I was on active duty, so the civil service pin didn’t apply, tho all the years of service did (37 total when I retired.)
I didn’t hold any of my post-gov’t jobs long enough to get any rewards, but I did get a nice clock at my second retirement, even tho I was there less than 4 years.
Yes, the Fed 5 year pins. Usually presented anywhere from two to seven years late. Our career program had mandatory mobility and we were dispersed through the world. Much of our record keeping was at the hands/mercy of the local personnel department. You kept copies/folders/documents of everything. You’d reconcile when you passed through the mother ship. Leave (all types) retirement programs, awards, etc …
My company is a little strange about anniversary dates; after a certain cutoff point, your anniversary won’t be acknowledged until the next year. For example, I was hired in March, so I didn’t receive my 5th anniversary pin until my 6th year, and my 10th anniversary pin until my 11th year.
Sometime between year 11 and year 15, corporate introduced a gift catalog. Since corporate doesn’t acknowledge my company’s anniversary weirdness, I received a link to the catalog promptly on my 15th anniversary. It was loaded with items of wildly varying quality - jewelry that looked like it came from Brendle’s or Service Merchandise, exercise equipment, branded power tools (I had my eye on a nice DeWalt miter saw), electronics, luggage, logo-branded clothes - it was wild. I ended up with a Le Creuset Dutch oven. A co-worker celebrating his 5th anniversary was less than pleased with the offerings though; he ended up with a paper shredder.
(And, as always, I received my 15th anniversary pin for year 16.)
We have an odd thing that the bonus at 25 years is bigger than the 30 or 35 year.
Regarding other company gifts, my husband got a Tiffany crystal platter as part of an award. I don’t think we’ve ever actually used it, but we still have it, plus the original box.
That’s getting pretty low on the scale of “shady” and “cheap”.
One year at a previous employer I got a performance award which was an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii for me and the wife. There were significant tax implications for the award as imputed income, but the company made up for it by adding a sufficient amount to my salary (which increment itself of course had a tax liability) to completely offset any cost. But that was a company known for its high ethical standards.
We got stuff from some standard “corporate gifts” catalog. Different stuff was available for different events (mostly just different price points). None of it was even branded with the company name.
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. (I dunno, is there a secondary market for a used smart watch?) None had any personalization, like, you know, “thank you for your service at Big insurance company”. It all felt so bland and like no one actually cared. And who wears watches these days? They could have offered something people still use, like a nice tablet or widescreen TV. (I actually do wear a wrist watch, but they didn’t offer anything as nice as the one i wear, a citizen eco solar-powered watch, which is not especially fancy or expensive.)
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.
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. But in general, eh, no complaints I guess. I didn’t make out like a bandit, but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. One thing I noticed was that between my 25th and 30th anniversary, is that they switched gift vendors to one offering cheaper gifts at every anniversary level 
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