What to buy someone who has everything

This is not a list of novelty gadgets. Those lists exist in their thousands and they don't help, because "has everything" is rarely a shopping problem.

Sometimes the person genuinely buys anything they want the moment they want it, so no object can be a surprise. Sometimes they want less stuff rather than more, which is a different problem again. More often you know them well, but not in the specific way that gift-buying needs. You know who they are. You don't know what their week looks like.

All of those point away from objects.

Why the usual approach fails

The instinct is to search harder. More obscure, more clever, more expensive. This produces the specific failure of the hard-to-buy-for person: a gift that is clearly thoughtful in intent and clearly wrong in fact. It sits on a shelf. Everyone is polite about it.

The problem is that "obscure" is not the same as "wanted". Someone who buys their own things has already filtered the market by their own taste, and competing with that filter is a losing game.

Four kinds of gift that still work

1. Consumable quality

Things that get used up don't compete with what they already own. A second bag of very good coffee isn't a duplicate. A second wallet is.

So: the good version of their ordinary. The coffee they'd never pay that much for, the olive oil, the whisky, the proper stationery. It upgrades a routine instead of adding an object.

2. Time and experience

A day out, a course, tickets, a meal booked and paid for. It doesn't need storing, and it produces something they don't already have, which is an occasion.

Two ways to get it wrong. Booking something you would enjoy, so be honest about whose taste it reflects. And forgetting that an experience puts an obligation in someone's diary, which for a parent of small children or a very busy person is a chore wearing a bow.

3. The thing they'd never buy themselves

Most people have at least one category they under-spend on without ever really deciding to. Someone with an immaculate kitchen and a fifteen-year-old dressing gown. Someone who cycles constantly on terrible tyres. This one requires you to have noticed something, which is why it lands.

4. Something only you could have given

The photograph nobody else has. The recipe in their grandmother's handwriting, framed. These cost little and are, by construction, impossible to already own.

The actual fix: pay attention earlier

The reason someone seems to have everything is usually that you're trying to reconstruct their inner life in a single afternoon in December. Nobody can do that.

What works instead costs nothing and takes ten seconds at a time. When someone mentions something in passing, write it down. That's the whole technique. People say what they want fairly often, and almost always at the wrong moment:

• "I keep meaning to get back into it."
• "Ours is on its last legs."
• "I've always wanted to try that."
• "I'd never spend that much on myself."

That last one is a gift request with the price objection already removed.

A handful of these, collected across a year, and the person who has everything turns out to have a fairly specific list. You just weren't holding a pen when they read it out.

If you're buying this week

No collected notes and the occasion is on Saturday? Then in order: consumable quality, an experience, or ask someone who sees them more often than you do. That last one is usually better than anything you'll find by searching.

Toayen is somewhere to put those ten-second notes. Keep what each person mentions, likes and avoids in one place, so next December you're reading rather than guessing. Free to download.