Gimme, Gimme
(excerpt)
The san francisco examiner
march 12, 2002
By sonia mansfield
Spring is rapidly approaching, and you know
what that means, don't you?
It's wedding season.
Couples everywhere are tying the knot, which
means you need to run out to the stores and by that special
couple a gift that -- when you think about -- they don't really
need.
What's the deal with that? In this day and
age where couples live together for years before getting hitched,
how relevant is a wedding registry?
Think about it. The average age of a bride
is 28 (early 30s for the groom). Do you really think they
need a blender or bed sheets? Don't they have these things
already?
Originally, the idea behind the wedding registry
was to give gifts to a young couple who are just starting
out, who need basic household items, from appliances to linens
to dishes.
But now the wedding registry has dissolved
into a means of providing items for couples that they would
never get for themselves, either because they can't afford
them or because they would just never think to buy these items.
...
At Web sites like Felicite.com and Yourweddingregistry.com,
couples can register for anything — literally.
Couples can register for anything they want
from any store anywhere in the world. You want something from
Staples? Fine. Toys R Us? OK. Safeway? Yep. Petco? Consider
it done.
Elsa Pinto-Melikian, founder of YourWeddingRegistry.com
— the most popular wedding registry site on AOL —
got the idea for her Web site when she was registering for
her own wedding.
"I was in my 30s when I got married.
I had just about everything," said Pinto-Melikian. "I
didn't want to register at Williams-Sonoma. I wanted to register
at Ace Hardware. I knew there were women like me whose needs
went beyond towels and a mixer."
...
It's true. Couples will ask for some pretty
unusual things when the sky's the limit.
"People have registered for purebred dogs," Pinto-Melikian
says of her site. "It's fun to see how creative people
can be."
...
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