Christmas gifts to or from suppliers /clients etc...

Beechman

This is the time of year when we normally are giving or receiving gifts from family or friends. If you are in business you may also be in a position to receive the odd bottle of wine ,hamper,voucher etc...or you may be forced to grit your teeth and give to someone who has giving you hell for the past year,but it can be a necessary evil .

What do you give to clients/customers ?
what have you received?
what is the worst and most tacky,
What is the most miserable or expensive item?
Did you deserve the gift or should it have gone to someone else in your company ?
What do you do with the 6 bottles of Baileys or the overstock?

Lets hear all your stories, now I am not talking about the gifts between family and friends

Rb

I'm only new to the company (August) but we're getting a meal/p1ssup in January as a thank you from the company that provides our product for us, which is nice.

Still haven't gotten anything from the customers but wouldn't expect it.

Karoma

Moved from AH (For the sake of future searches more than anything. As you were...)

Snake Plisken

worked in construction used to get wine,whiskey,brandy, Salmon, hampers etc seemed to be the done deal bosses had no problems.
Worked in supermarket chain head office buyers there used to get boot loads of food stuffs actually made the reps give them, then they were mean and never gave the staff anything, they got Turkeys ham and left with full boots every evening.
Then went to Americano multinational who mad us do annual courses to make sure we did not forget the rules about not accepting gifts, i suppose its right but the odd bottle of wine wasn't going to influence who got orders etc, and I know for a fact some suppliers were bringing managers to World Cup matches and European matches on the sly.
My thoughts are that small presents like bottles of wine or whiskey or small hamper are fine to give, not going to influence me one way or the other but match tickets holidays free big screen tv's etc are a no-go, as you'll get caught out at some stage.

Kintarō Hattori

I work in retail and I buy in a good portion of the goods from suppliers. I was very chuffed to be taken out to dinner recently to a restaurant I'd never go to myself with my other half, my boss and his wife and our suppliers by the Irish rep for a large networking hardware manufacturer. On the same night I also received a bottle of polish vodka from the supplier which was a really nice gesture as she/they knew my GF was polish.
This year I also received a tin of roses from another supplier!! And hopefully in the post soon will be a crapload of vouchers for Argos/Dunnes and Tesco's which will be nice.

Last year I got lots of bottles of wine from Irish suppliers but I was really surprised by our german supplier who sent over a special gift pack which had a special bottle of Jack Daniels, 2 x Jack Daniel tumblers, a poker set and a copy of Maverick on DVD.
It's not the kind of thing I thought they did and it was really unexpected.

Ehhh none of this influences me though. Your pretty idiotic if you let one small item or moment in the year dictate how business should be done through the rest of the year.