Is this stingy?

[baconandeggies]

Grandma receives a free Confused.com robot in the post as she used the website for taking out home insurance.

A week or so later she wraps it up and gives it to her 7 yo granddaughter for her birthday.

Granddaughter is easily pleased - it says things when you press a button and it goes forwards after you pull it backwards.

Parents are bemused but decide to say nothing as daughter is happy. GM enquires as to whether she liked it and what it does.

GM has often been described as tight - has no money worries.

AIBU for thinking the gift was a bit stingy? Or are we ungrateful?

A lot of people getting very excited that 'a robot is a cool toy'. It's not 'a robot', it's a plastic gonk that makes a noise. It's not exactly going to instil a love of robotics and technology.

It's basically 3D junk-mail. I wouldn't give someone a takeaway leaflet on the basis they liked Asian literature, or a posted tea bag sample because they like tea. It is stingy and it's passing on unsolicited junk, which really annoys me because we live in one of those super-strict bin areas and it feels like they just want me to dispose of something awkward. We'd have to drive that sodding robot to the tip.

My great aunt was minted, and I mean minted. Every Christmas we'd go to her house on Boxing Day and she'd give me and my brother whatever box of chocolates she'd been given at Christmas wrapped in newspaper, and my parents a set of placemats that she'd been given (it became a running joke as the placemats went round our family for years!) again wrapped in newspaper. We thought it was really exciting as kids, because it was something different. It's not about money (or it shouldn't be) or how much time has gone into a gift. It's the fact they bothered to give a gift at all that matters.

If you think that's bad, when my in laws used to take my kids out and they spotted those rides in shopping centres that you put 50p in, they would put the kids in and just shake it/make relevant noises to save spending the money!

It's very thoughtless and I think it's tight ,you're not being unreasonable .Bit of an insult really imo.

YABVU. She received a gift and one that she liked! Whether her grandma got it free or not should not even be questioned.

I really can't understand all the mercenary present comparison that's going on.

Think it's actually nice for a girl to have some girlie perceptions challenged.

Do you think perhaps she used that website particularly with a view to getting the robot because she thought your dd would like it?( Killing two birds with one stone, as it were). That shows a bit of thought, not stinginess

I'm with you OP - very stingy.

Yanbu. Presents are meant to be something you buy that they actually like. A regift is fine I think if well targetted but not something that came free initially

Presents are meant to be something you buy that they actually like.

Fixed that for you, ridingsixwhitehorses

I remember my DS's 4th birthday. I bought him a proper big present that I'd paid for, he got paid-for presents from other people, and I can't remember what any of them were now, a decade later, and neither can he. We both can remember that I also gave him one of those free tube maps that you pick up in tube stations, and I remember how utterly delighted he was with it, as he was a bit obsessed with the tube map at the time.

It's about what pleases them when they get it, not about how much it cost, even if the cost was nothing.

But it's Brian. He's so cute. misses point entirely

Dh family is like this so annoying🙄😣

Why the zombie resurrection?!

Browndoll is going round resurrecting threads, for some reason