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?

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25Sep/110

HAUL: Birthday Presents

Last week was my 25th birthday. I haven't had a chance to post much since then because, the day after my birthday, I was bitten by a dog on my right hand. It's a long story, but I'm fine; it's just a little harder than usual to type.

Anyway, I received a number of items off my wish list, as well as some other great presents; you can check out all the goodies below. The only birthday deal I wound up using was the Rita's one for a free regular ice, partly because of my injury but in large part because most of the offers weren't compelling enough for me to go out of my way to use them.

The Goods

5 Fives

5 sets of 5 items

Books, etc.

Books and more

Penguins

Penguin umbrella

Jersey

Ravens jersey

Books

3 books



Read on for all the details.