YES!!  My boss did that one year!  His GF owned a high end spa and everyone including the men got a $25 gift card. The cheapest thing on the menu was around $60 if I recall. I never used mine. 

I was eleven, and I’d asked for a skateboard like my best friends in the neighborhood had (this was in the mid 60s). Instead, what I got was an aquarium... but just the aquarium. No fish, no plants, not even any gravel - just that empty glass box. Being a well-raised southern girl child, I of course said thank you.…

One time my ex girlfriend got me a gun rack. A gun rack. I don’t even own a gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. What am I gonna do...with a gun rack?

I feel like your parents are assholes.

My brother once gave his wife a fake lottery ticket that said she won... but if you read the fine print it basically calls you an a-hole for believing you can win the lottery.

Why do so many parents pull this shit? Why???

I will never understand parents who ruin an actual good gift by making their kid feel like shit first (is how I feel about it).

For a few years there my sister passed along employee giveaways from her Big Pharma company to me as Xmas presents. Promotional sweatshirts, a “How Big Pharma Has Improved the World” type book, and a lucite block with five vials of famous world-changing vaccines (that one was, admittedly, kinda cool, but still).

Ah, back in the early 90's child-Kuma wanted the tabletop/cardgame Hands-Down with a firey passion. Xmas morning came, kiddo-Kuma sprinted down the stairs, attacked the first approximately appropriately sized present and found himself.... a frying pan.

My uncle gave me a box full of cologne samples that he picked up at Macys and Nordstrom. My dad was so pissed off that he banned him from every visiting again.

Chlamydia.

I was 14, and the Nintendo 64 had been out for a little over a year in the states... I was desperate for one. My parents had divorced maybe 18 months before this, so this was my first Christmas at my mom’s new home.

That reminds me of a viral video from a few years ago where a kid (looked about 7) opened his present and got an XBOX 360. Then he opened it and there were only socks in it. The look on his face as he fights back the urge to cry was heartbreaking, especially as his mother and older brother were laughing at him and…

I just want to respond to all of these with “What the FUCK”

I know how I feel about it.

Starbucks gift card.

“I .. got .. a mobile electronic organ player. My Mom told me ‘it has buttons right ? Just like a computer’ … (she took the money and bought an automatic washing machine). I’m still fucking upset Mom!”~tgh_hmn”

Damn. Your mom took the money meant to buy you a nice computer, gave you some crap toy, then spent it on…

One of those big coupon books they sell to raise money for schools and stuff.

Don’t give people gifts they have to spend money to use.

95% of those coupons will be for things they don’t even want.

When I was 6 years old, we all went to the living room and started passing presents out. We usually go around the room until they’re gone. Each time I received mine it was in a different sized box, but contained the same thing: rocks. After all the presents were handed out I had a pile of rocks. Then my parents asked…

Will never top this one in my lifetime. A 3-foot-high stack of maxi pads. the kind you get out of a commercial vending machine. I was 12. this was in front of my entire family.