Adventures of a Frugalista
16Oct/116

Rant: Target’s Gift Messages

I just placed an order on Target.com for a baby gift. Since I was shipping the gift to the mom-to-be and wouldn't be able to attend her shower in person, I wanted to include a gift message. I attempted to include the following message:

Congratulations! We're so excited for you. We can't wait to meet the little one!

Love, Andrea & William (Mike)

(We had to go with a turtle theme; the mascot of William's alma mater is a terrapin, after all.)

Yet Target told me that they could not include my message because it contained special characters or unacceptable words. Um, what?

On top of that, Target had erased my entire message and didn't bother to tell me which characters or words were unacceptable. So I tried again, removing all line breaks.

Still unacceptable. I tried again, removing all parantheses and the ampersand. Still unacceptable. I tried again, thinking that perhaps Target's vocabulary wasn't quite large enough to include "alma mater" and "terrapin," so I changed them to "college" and "turtle," respectively. Still unacceptable.

When I was on the verge of hitting my computer, I simply tried,

Congratulations! Love, Andrea and William

Finally, Target deemed my message acceptable and attached it to the gift.

But Target, I'd really like to know...
What was unacceptable about my original message?

Posted by andréa

Comments (6) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Genericizing your message makes it acceptable. Welcome to Stepford.

  2. that’s bizarre!

  3. I had the same thing happen with several different stores when I have shipped gifts lately. It is 2011-why can we not write what we WANT for the gift message? Can you work on resolving that please, Andrea (see…I cannot even put your accent mark in!) Cindy

  4. “We cannot process your Gift message as it contains special characters or unacceptable words” Same thing happened to me on a gift registry. What an enormous waste of time – and I still can’t figure out why the filter will not accept my message. Even this was rejected: “Congratulations! Love, Eva”

    I sent a note to customer service – but with Amazon Online – who need to go through this grief over at Target?

    • Agreed! I understand that all of these online forms have limitations, but it’s difficult for us to follow them if they don’t tell us what’s wrong or how to fix it.


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