I did think the hint for gifts was a bit much. I was a bit annoyed at his mention of it every time the holidays came around, but he was nice the rest of the year so I didn’t let it bother me too much.

It’s interesting that you mentioned pretzel buttons. I thought about providing him with something similar, but I wasn’t sure about his health and didn’t want to assume the item I bought would be appropriate for him.

It turns out he didn’t think the gift card was appropriate either!

Hmm. So you think he was trying to help out the next postal carrier by telling me that he didn’t like my gift and the next guy wouldn’t either. Interesting take on it.

I provided a gift card that could be used a whole host of restaurants in our state. My grandmother has purchased them for my husband and I in the past and we’ve never had a problem covering the bill with it.

Oh how I wish I could think faster on my feet! I think he was looking for me to give him cash after he complained. Of course, I had no intention of doing that so he certainly should’ve kept his complaint to himself.

It’s true that everyone prefers cash, but the post office specifically frowns on it, so I thought I should avoid it. Guess not 🙂

I thought the mail carrier knocked on our door to say goodbye, but you could be right, it could have been a ploy to complain about his gift. I’m not sure what he expected me to do. I certainly wasn’t going to turn around, grab my wallet and pull out $20 for him.

Ha! I haven’t met the new mailman yet and yes we will continue to do nice things for him (like leave cold drinks out, etc.) Maybe I’ll start dishing out Amazon gift cards the next time around, since it seems the post office frowns on giving cash to carriers. Who can complain about that kind of gift card?

That’s an interesting take on it Tammy. My postal carrier actually hinted at getting a gift on multiple occasions, so maybe he didn’t think the pay was good enough or he wanted a little extra money in his pocket before retiring.

Thanks for your comment. I definitely think I stood at the door with my mouth open. I was shocked to hear a grown man complain about a gift.

I live in an urban neighborhood with door-to-door mail service as well. I’m also a WAHM, so I’m on pleasant terms with the mail carrier as well as the UPS guy. At the holidays, I give them pretzel buttons. The difficulty is that during the holidays, there are always extra UPS drivers and sometimes different mail carriers on this route, so it might take a week to actually see the year-round worker.