The best client appreciation gifts

This week is client appreciation week, and my team is charged with coming up with unique client gift ideas for client appreciation gifts for the office. Did I get to pick who was in this team? No. So I am stuck with Mary, Gary, and Larry, the most bland sacks of flour in the office, trying to come up with creative client gifts. Boss said they needed to be upscale client gifts as well, none of the shabby stuff like last year. So I ask him what range of cost are we thinking, and he says somewhere between shoe lace and speed boat. I am reminded of his uselessness and get to work with Mary, Gary, and Larry. Mary says that radios are all the rage right now, but then when I hit the desk she zones back into 2021 and leaves 1954 behind. Gary keeps saying the word turkey, and I can’t tell if he means it as a gift or he is having lunchtime tunnel vision again. I send him off to the kitchen and turn to Larry. He is deep in a crossword puzzle when I call on him for an idea, and he randomly says the word Yeti. I leave him to fill in the four-lettered box, but that gives me a good idea! Perhaps a cooler would be a nice gift for our clients. Something that says, “We appreciate all you do and love working with you, go have a drink or ten for us.” I broach the idea to my trusty trio. Mary doesn’t quite understand what a cooler is just yet, Gary is reminded of a diet coke he left in the fridge, and Larry looks up from his crossword only to look right at me and sneeze without breaking eye contact.

Boss comes back in and reminds us we need to be focused on finding appropriate client appreciation gifts during covid, maybe something extra thankful for covid customer appreciation. So I thought, why not plan some event where we can give out some client gifts during covid. By this point Mary was daydreaming again, Gary was having his post lunch nap, and Larry was getting irritable because he could’t solve the next word of his puzzle. I started brainstorming on what could be some appropriate events during covid time. There is always the virtual meetings, but Mary says those are worse for the soul than live meetings are for the body. Either way, we never got the software for that type of stuff, so it will have to be a live meeting. How about a socially distanced thanksgiving feast? The holiday was just around the corner, many clients probably will not be able travel to see their families, this is perfect! Gary stands and pounds the table, stammering turkey, turkey, turkey. Holy hell, the crazy old son of a gun had the right idea the whole time. I decide to make Gary my trusty right hand man for the foreseeable future.

So me and Gary begin to discuss some thanksgiving gifts covid wouldn’t ruin, discussing some thanksgiving client appreciation gifts. So I say, what about inside this cooler we put some sort of pie? Each cooler gets either pumpkin, pecan or apple pie. I can see Gary is salivating at the subject, so I know he is on board. As for more luxury thanksgiving gifts, Larry blurted out the word Faux, and I thought what if we get some cheap fake fur jackets for the clients? They would seem real and valuable at least. So I send Mary to the store to put in a bulk order of six hundred pumpkin, pecan and apple pies. I have Gary place an order on some sketchy clothing website for six hundred of their finest, faux-est fur coats. We still want one, maybe a couple more thanksgiving appreciation ideas for our clients. I tell Larry to think of every object he can that has warm coloring. Basketballs, oranges, that sort of stuff. We will get these things and make a huge basket and each client can take one object from it at the end of the thanksgiving feast. It’s weird but also unique.

Coincidentally, boss walks in just then and tells us to focus on bulk gifts under $5 for our personalized client gifts. I say we have the client appreciation gifts bulk part down, but not the under $5 part. Not even under $500 at this point, Larry has been dishing out warm-colored objects like nobody’s business. It’s like watching Good Will Hunting with this guy. Gary has been adding everything he writes to an Amazon cart as well. I haven’t heard from Mary in a while but I am actually growing pretty proud of this team I was stuck with. I thought we were just about finished with the list. Larry was running out of steam, face turning red, sweat beading on his forehead. So I said stop, we didn’t need him short-circuiting again. Then we saw a title on Amazon that read “customer appreciation gifts bulk” and my eyes were opened wide. List upon list of bulk gifts to buy for our customers, and I think I bought just about every one. This thanksgiving event was going way over budget by now, but I’m growing kind of tired of this job anyway, whatever happens happens at this point.

So over the next week we start getting all this random junk we forgot we ordered and putting it all into client appreciation gift boxes. Boss suggested getting some virtual client appreciation ideas, but no virtual gift is better than what we got for them. We kind of lost the idea of personalized client appreciation gifts, these gifts will be far more random that in previous years, but that’s okay. This year is unprecedented, nothing should be expected anymore. So me, Mary, Gary, and Larry begin to set up the feast. Each seat must be six feet from the next, which is perfect because each of these client gift baskets is about six feet wide anyway. A truck pulls up and opens the back door to reveal six hundred pies and three hundred turkeys. The warehouse is full of faux fur jackets. Everything is starting to fall into place. I’m not calling myself a genius or anything, I couldn’t have done all this without my amazing team. We sit down at the feast table and share an apple pie while wearing our own faux fur coats. Tomorrow will be a day to remember, no matter how expensive it may be.

The feast is a smash hit. Everyone asks me, from a safe distance of course, how we came up with customer appreciation ideas during covid. I simply led them to meet the geniuses that are Mary, Gary and Larry. I let them talk about the customer appreciation gifts during covid and how we thought of them. I was impressed. Gary didn’t mention food except for when it was necessary, Mary didn’t mention the Great War once, and Larry didn’t even have a crossword puzzle in his back pocket. So we gave everybody their coolers, which they put any unfinished pies and turkey into. We gave them their faux fur coats and took a massive, socially distanced, group picture. Later on, when I looked at this photo we took, I could see on my boss’s face that this event clearly was not what he had in mind. Oh well, I say, we did all we could under these strange and unpredictable circumstances, and it seems that the clients absolutely loved this event and won’t be leaving our company any time soon. I planned to tell boss that exact thing when he pulled me aside with a strange look on his face.

Boss pulls me aside, and strangely, he is smiling now! He’s holding his phone up to me showing me all of these customer appreciation messages he has received, one after another, customer appreciation letter after customer appreciation letter, thanking him for a wonderful thanksgiving. They loved the food and can’t believe the quality of those fur coats. He shows me one more customer appreciation gifts text message that says, “If it weren’t for Mary, Gary, and Larry, this thing might never have happened!” So boss tells me he is going to give them all a raise, and he will let me get a better parking spot next quarter. For a moment I struggle to understand what just happened, I start to argue, but I look behind boss and see Mary, Gary, and Larry smiling and hugging like I have never seen before. I could tell boss this was basically all my work, I could tell him I deserve that raise, but that just isn’t what the holidays are about. So I gave thanks for my parking spot, and I broke the good news to my team, and they cheered. And thus we save our company in the woes of covid.