Registries were like a really fun nightmare.
It was really fun, because, well, it's shopping with a scan gun. And it was a nightmare because, shopping with a scan gun is not as fun as it sounds.
The problem is, you don't know what you're looking for. You go into this with the idea of what you see on TV and movies: coffee maker, toaster, bed set. And we don't drink coffee so that really left us with nothing. To top that off, we're picky, well, we're not so much picky as we think most things are ugly or we can't see the use in a lot of things normal people would buy.
We started at Target because that what the only place I could ever remember seeing a registry sign. As I said in the last post, they give you a Shutterfly gift card, a cute little box to keep all your wedding papers in, some coupons for things like teeth whitening strips and other things that other almost-weds apparently buy, and a really slow, badly charged scan gun.
We picked a good bit of stuff there. A really hard thing is trying to match what you're shopping for with the other things that you scanned. Because, you don't know what you were after, you just kind of picked things you saw and liked and now this could mean that you live in a nightmarish rainbow of mismatched housewares for a very long time.
They (they being the people that tell you how to do wedding stuff) suggest that you register for two times the gifts as the amount of guests you invited. Seriously? I don't have that much stuff now and this stuff took me my LIFETIME to accumulate. Plus, we live in a one bedroom duplex... where exactly am I to keep a food processor, blender, AND mini chopper?
We at least were able to knock that down to "more gifts than the amount of invitations we sent out."
Well, the issue with that is... there still are not THAT many things at Target we like. Futhermore, I'm also registering for things like spoons and nobody is going to just bring you one spoon (unless it is a REALLY NICE spoon) so you can't count that sort of thing as one object. That's like a fraction of an object.
Since we can't find enough things here we like this sent us on to Bed Bath and Beyond... and man, if we thought there was a load of crap we didn't need in Target... BBB had two times that (apparently, they understand the registering guidelines). BBB was woefully inadequate at fulfilling our needs (mainly because I didn't know what half of that stuff did). And they tried to get us to pick out ugly China.
We made an online ThinkGeek registry - which was more silly than anything.
Finally we figured, JC Penny. We can easily fulfill our quota there.
Alright, here's the deal with JC Penny, you get a lot for registering there. Completion deals (still not quite sure what that means), free engagement portrait, registry announcement cards, and wedding planning binder (I was very excited because I love to organize) but if you're the kind of person who would say something like, "Who would pay THAT MUCH for a POTHOLDER?!" this might not be the place for you.
I'm going to go ahead and linking JC Penny even though we ended up just clearing out that registry and moving on, because they are super nice and have a lot of perks. But, I only suggest registering there if you hate your friends and family and want to make them waste as much money as possible.
Oh, what did help us out though, was in that nifty wedding planning binder was a registry guide. It had a guide to picking out knives and pot and pans, a description of different kitchen gadgets and an overview of thread count. It also had a checklist of things you should register for. It was like someone said, "You stupid kids don't know a thing about housewares - here's a crash course."
Although, they contradicted themselves a bit by including things like "hostess set," "serving set," "stock pot," and "trivet" some of which I still don't know what they are. Apparently a hostess set is just silverware... which confuses me since they already listed silverware...
We ended up settling on Macy's (mainly from theknot.com ads yelling at me about it enough) and with the help of our handy dandy JC Penny checklist were able to bolster the Target and BBB registries enough that people should have enough to choose from and we should be at least decently aware of what each item does.
To see our actual registries, check the links in the side bar.
