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Wrapping gifts: French fall short

By RONDA RICH

During a gathering at my house, the divas, somehow, got into a discussion on the snootiness of Parisian store clerks.

It is an internationally acknowledged fact that when Americans shop in Paris, they are treated with less respect than the New York Metropolitan Opera patrons pay to the Grand Ole Opry devotees.

This is always a source of amusement to me, in Paris or in Atlanta, that sales folks who are paid a few dollars an hour are condescending to customers who are prepared to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the products they’re selling.

It’s as unnatural as an ant moving above a coyote on the food chain.

I don’t know where this snootiness comes from but I have found one area where America’s South knows better than Paris:

Gift wrapping.

Southern women are unbeatable when it comes to gift wrapping because to us, it’s all about presentation.

I have seen my sister, on more occasions than one, spend 45 minutes making a bow for one package. She twists, she ties and she holds these artistic masterpieces in a way that makes her fingers cramp before the task is finished.

She has passed the skill along to her daughter, Nicole, who often teaches others how to make elaborate, lush bows.

Merri Grace painstakingly wraps presents to match invitations and uses double-sided tape. “I don’t want that ugly tape showing on my beautiful packages,” she sniffs.

I can only hope that Merri Grace never gets a present from my mama, who, inevitably, wraps with tiny, torn pieces of masking tape.

“I don’t want to waste any of it,” Mama points out.

Having long been entrenched in this environment, I was nothing short of astounded during a recent encounter with a French-owned luxury store.

Karen’s birthday was approaching so Rickey requested help. She wanted an expensive French designer billfold. “If you’re near the store, could you pick it up?”

A few days later, I had selected the costly billfold in a store where security guards greet you when you enter and all the sales assistants are dressed in fancy black clothes. As the sophisticated associate was ringing up the sale, I asked, “Could you wrap it, please?”

She smiled. “Of course, ma’am.”

She disappeared into a back room then reemerged shortly. “I was lucky,” she explained. “I found one already wrapped.”

On the counter, she placed a beige box embossed with the designer’s name. A plain, skimpy turquoise colored ribbon was tied in a knot, not a bow, around the box.

Speechless, I’d stared. Was it a joke? I lifted my head and, with widened eyes, asked, “You’re joking, right?”

“Is there a problem?” Her tone was crisp.

“There is, if this is what you call ‘wrapped.’”

The lady next to me, no doubt a true Southern woman, started laughing. For a couple of minutes, I discussed my vision of wrapped compared to that of the French.

“When you give a present, you like for it to be a surprise,” I explained gently in elementary terms. “When you give a box with the name of the gift across it, that’s no surprise.”

I refrained from, “And when it cost this much, it should be wrapped in 14K gold paper.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

Fifteen minutes later, she returned with a box wrapped in brown paper, one step above butcher paper, with no ribbon or bow. I was relieved to see that she had not used masking tape.

French retailers may think American shoppers are uncouth but Southern women know something much worse about them.

They can’t make a bow.