Corporate Holiday Gift Basket

It never fails: we start off the quarter with the best intentions, and end up missing our targets. Our boss has tried everything to enhance team performance. She tried bribing us with corporate gift baskets, encouraging us with positive words and hugs, and even threatening us with public shaming and humiliation. I really enjoyed my corporate holiday gift basket, although I thought the candy canes were a little weird since the gift basket was given to me in late August - but I ate them all the same. Of course. Everyone was given different office gift baskets with different themes. I would have liked to have been given the “Mardis Gras” themed gift basket, which came with wine glasses and a bottle of rum. Instead, my gift basket for office staff had Hershey Kisses wrapped in red and green foil, and two pairs of socks covered in little Santa heads. Super cute, sure, but not quite as fun as the basket of hard liquor. Anyway, just a few months ago we were just days away from the end of the quarter, and we were on track to miss our targets again. Our boss Sally said she was just days away from quitting her job. I’m not sure if she was going to quit as a way to punish us, or because she was genuinely that frustrated. Maybe she was just worried about her job, and figured it would be better to quit than be fired. She had the worst-performing team in the entire company. I felt bad. I really liked Sally. That was when everything changed. With just a few changes to the way we do business, my team went from being one of the lowest performing teams in the company, to the highest. I’ll tell you how.

So, yeah, Sally was beside herself. It would be the third quarter in a row - the third quarter of missed targets, low overall functioning. Sally was understandably worried that the powers that be would replace her. The team decided to make her feel better, so we all pitched in to buy her luxury corporate gift baskets. The gift baskets came in various themes, and we had a hard time choosing the theme. I wanted to get her the Easter-themed luxury gift baskets, which came complete with chocolate eggs and a live bunny. I thought maybe Sally would enjoy successfully caring for a rabbit she got from her luxury gift baskets. This was my reasoning: Sally wasn’t able to effectively take care of our team, but we could show her that she wasn’t a failure at everything. She can, after all, keep a fuzzy little bunny rabbit from a luxury corporate gift baskets for clients alive. We bought her an Easter-themed gift basket, but became frustrated when the luxury corporate gifts company sent a basket that I can only describe as an Eat Your Vegetables basket. It came with a casserole dish filled with Brussels sprouts. I thought, man, we really can’t get anything right.

So we wanted to make it up to Sally. We also wanted to keep our jobs. We figured that if we couldn’t perform better, Sally might get fired now, but it wouldn’t stop there. Soon, they’d be out for our jobs too. We decided there was no way we were going to fall short again, even if it meant we had to sell in bulk on the street. But first, we decided to buy the best corporate gift baskets for Sally’s bosses, Dave Johnson and Dave Beeman. We call them The Daves. Dave and Dave run the company like tyrants, terrorizing the people who work for them. Most of the people in Sally’s job quit after just eight months. Sally was unique at the company in that she had been working for The Daves for over three years. We suspected that Sally was only able to tolerate them by buying them the best luxury gift baskets on the market at the end of every quarter. The gourmet gift baskets would placate The Daves, make them less likely to yell about problems like low sales numbers. The Daves had been known to throw rotten fruit at managers with low sales numbers, and strip people of their vacation time. It seemed like the only thing that Sally was doing differently from the other managers was buying them unique corporate gift baskets - really incredible, unique gift baskets.

So here’s what happened: we came up with a plan for selling the most we had ever sold in any quarter. The newest employees on the team were assigned to office blocks throughout the city, where they had to walk around and push the product. My company sells chocolate bars and candy and things, so selling on the streets isn’t as hard as you might think. They started early in the morning, just before the morning rush hour. They used the baskets from the corporate gift baskets for employees that Sally gave us in last quarter’s bribe. Senior people on the team drove around in company vans, distributing to the street people and collecting money. They filled the gift basket for group with more chocolate bars and gummy bears. Actually, it was the gummy bears that ended up being the dark horse of that quarter: the people on the streets just couldn’t get enough. We filled gift basket for group with bag after bag of gummy bears, and they just went like hot cakes. It turned out that someone on the streets had started a rumor that the gummy bears contained trace amounts of drugs. Really, the people buying the gummy bears thought that they were “funny gummies.” The gift baskets for employees working from home became the vehicles for delivering the funny gummies.

I’ll tell you something weird that happened. I tried one of the gummy bears, wondering what everyone was getting worked up over. We’re a candy company. Our products don’t contain drugs stronger than sugar and caffeine. But, I snuck a gummy bear from one of the unique corporate gift baskets, and I definitely felt something. My body started getting light, my muscles started to relax, and my mind started to open up to some very weird ideas. I thought, wow, these are the most unique corporate gifts I’ve ever had. No wonder the gummy bears were selling like crazy! With everyone on the streets and so much money changing hands, some people started to get greedy. By the second day, the numbers weren't quite adding up. I was disgusted. I thought we were a team! We’re trying to save our jobs and also Sally’s! How could they take the money they were making? Meanwhile, the gummies in the best custom gift baskets were selling out in the early part of the day. People were taking the gummies to their jobs. Eating them there. And then working while high.

The next day, Sally brought everyone in and started asking questions. She wanted to know, first of all, how were we suddenly selling all that candy? How had things changed? When we showed her the corporate gift baskets and told her about how popular the gummy bears had become, she was stunned. We showed her our sales sheets and the now empty unique corporate gifts baskets, which were becoming the symbols of our success. Then Sally narrowed her eyes as she studied the sales sheets more carefully. Some of the totals, she said, weren’t adding up. She asked if we had left some of the money in the corporate gifts baskets. When one person finally admitted to skimming, Sally was mortified. Not only was stealing wrong and illegal, but also the Daves were going to kill her if they found out. They’d almost certainly be throwing way more than rotten fruit at her. Sally was envisioning they would drop her into a whole dunk tank full of dead fish or something. That probably sounds like an over-reaction, but you don’t know The Daves. They’re crazy.

So, Sally was horrified. She almost fired the more senior members of the team on the spot. She said we should know better. She also told us that it would be a long time - maybe years - before she would be giving us more corporate gifts for employees. We believed her, too. We had never seen Sally so angry. I personally came to her later and apologized. I felt bad, because I was one of the most senior people on the team. I had been getting those branded corporate gifts from her for years, and I really felt like I deserved whatever punishment I would get. Sure, I hadn’t been the one selling the gummies in corporate holiday gift baskets, and I definitely hadn’t taken any of the money. But I should have known that the newbies needed more supervision. I should have paid attention to the warning signs when that new girl took all the paper towels and toilet paper out of the bathroom. Who does that, really? That toilet paper is thin as tissue paper! No one wanted to go back out after that, so we missed our targets for the third quarter in a row. We have a new boss now.