Shame on gift-laundering

Dear Miss Manners: I have recently learned about another way for couples to get cash instead of gifts for their wedding without coming out and crassly asking for it.

We were invited to a wedding, and I was talking to my sister about what to choose from the gift registry. She noticed that the couple had requested two slow cookers, and I mentioned that they also seemed to have registered for three identical wool blankets as well.

I ordered an item, but when I tried to have it sent to my house instead of to the couple, I found the item could be sent only to the address set up for the couple.

I contacted the store and was informed they didn’t offer that feature (to send it to a different address), but the person I was communicating with said he would “bring it up at the next meeting.”

Later I talked to the bride-to-be, and she told me that they don’t actually get the gifts; they get the value of the gifts put into their account, and they can spend it however they want: “We don’t want to get anything we don’t want.”

Gentle Reader: laundering scheme.

There seems to be no shortage of commercial enterprises that enable bridal couples to shake down their wedding guests these days.

This one is particularly insulting as it tries to fool those guests into thinking they are exercising even the minimal amount of choice in how they spend their money by selecting something that the couple have fraudulently said they wanted.

Miss Manners is afraid that this sort of thing will stop only when people refuse to go along with the demands of their supposed hosts, whether these demands are made in the form of shopping lists, aka gift registries, or blatant or devious demands for money.

Unfortunately, many people have resigned themselves to this as a sort of admission price for attending weddings.

Why they would want to attend the weddings of people who are practicing extortion on them, Miss Manners cannot imagine. Oh, a