A string of events has led to the situation where I have a Secret Santa who is sending me rather pleasant and thoughtful gifts, without having a giftee allotted to me, essentially allowing me to free-ride the exercise. One may wonder why I’m complaining about this, and that would be a reasonable question to ask. The problem is that this makes me think of the person who is unhappily wondering why he/she has not received any gifts yet. Hence, the moral dilemma.
There remains a large amount of ambiguity when it comes to determining if one is supposed to find out the identity of one’s Secret Santa. Somewhat extensive research involving asking bleary-eyed and possibly inebriated Cauvery residents at 4 in the morning and a perusal of the rules of the exercise has failed to settle the question of whether one is supposed to find out who one’s Santa is. If one is supposed to uncover the identity, it makes it a bond-building-with-strangers exercise. If one is not supposed to know the identity, Secret Santa would become a personalized gift-giving system without the hassle of uncovering identities and generating any social obligations between the Santa and the giftee. Ultimately, the unanswered question is this: whether Secret Santa is supposed to provide one with thoughtful gifts from a stranger with the intention that such personalized gift-giving lead to a friendship or is it merely to provide the giftee with thoughtful gifts that may be desirable without the hassle of obligations?
Let’s examine the first case, where one is supposed to discover the identity of one’s Secret Santa. This would make Secret Santa a community building exercise, which is a very laudable objective. However, one must also keep in mind the potentially undesirable consequences of this noble objective. If one were to discover that their Secret Santa or giftee is somebody who they generally dislike, one may resent the obligations that the Secret Santa system has created, for one may not wish to establish any sort of relationship (along the lines of an acquaintance) with their Santa or giftee. So instead of creating a sort of camaraderie between people, it has created the possibility of placing people in very awkward situations. Imagine drawing the name of your ex-girlfriend, that one person on campus whose nose you broke or that one night stand you never spoke to again.
In the second case, which in my opinion is the idea behind Secret Santa, the point of Secret Santa, when the identity of the Santa is not to be revealed, is to provide participants with personalized gifts, from what can be called as “the universe,” or a secret benefactor, with the sole objective being to provide those who have signed up for the exercise with a pleasant experience and thoughtful gifts without the obligations that would accompany identity-revealing. This would not be unlike the belief of children in the magnanimous (yet morally judgemental) Santa Claus. This would make Secret Santa a co-operative scheme, relying on the cooperation of participants to establish a sustainable good trip-generating system, by gifting their giftees things that they would like. Now the problem with this system is the inevitable creation of free riders that accompanies every scheme that is based on co-operation. These free riders can be created due to multiple reasons, with a couple off the top of my head being one such as signing up for the exercise and then backing out, but the same not being reflected in the picking up of chits with names due to say, a problem in communication. This would lead to a situation in which someone is receiving gifts without having a giftee to give gifts to. This creates some sort of moral obligation to find the person who still hasn’t received any gifts due to his/her name not being picked up by the free rider. The other reasons being the simple ignoring of one’s duty as a Secret Santa due to reasons of laziness or impecuniousness. The writer strongly condemns those who fall in the second category. In either case, a free rider has been created (refer: R. Arneson, The Principle of Fairness and Free-Rider Problems), which endangers the sustainability of such a cooperative scheme. This leads to the question of possible sanctions that can be imposed on the free rider, which can fuel a debate for quite a while as to the nature and severity of intended punishment.
It is fairly clear from the above analysis that there is no way to settle the debate. The first option will lead to unwelcome potentially awkward situations, but can be used to eliminate free riders, while the second will eliminate this awkwardness, but will potentially lead to existence (and thriving) of free riders.
So the next time you sign up to participate in Secret Santa, enquire first as to the nature of the scheme. It is quite possible that you may end up with a person who you may not wish to be obligated to send gifts to, or a Santa who may not send a single gift your way. Or you could end up like me, receiving gifts, without being anyone’s Santa yourself. To whoever had a lousy Christmas and a crappy new year, the unintentional free rider apologizes.
This article was written by Shikhar Garg (Batch of 2018)
Pratham stands at the counter, sipping his tea in what he considers to be a dignified silence. It’s a slow, cool day. Less heat means fewer customers. His eyes narrow as a boy, the one who insists on calling him “Umesh,” (despite his repeated reprimands and use of expletives in a language the boy doesn’t understand), crosses the road and goes to the juice shop opposite Umesh’s. The boy owes him 345 rupees, a tab that Pratham had generously opened for him as he was a loyal consumer. This act of disloyalty would cost him. Pratham makes a quick calculation in his head, and the boy now owes him 380. Smooth.
The allure of half-decent sandwiches seems to be too much to resist for some of his former customers. Add debatably better juice and a variety of cigarettes to that, and you have a winning juice shop. So a reasonable assumption to make would be that if one juice shop provides all of these in one place, it would be the clear favorite of a majority of the people, right? Wrong.
The vitriolic attacks and glares that Pratham had bestowed upon his former customers when a competitor opened shop opposite him had led several Law School-ites to believe that he had lost a substantial amount of business. I would attribute this shift in consumer preferences to his watery juices and constant pestering to repay credit. Add to that universal fondness for the more often than not cheerful service of his most direct competitor. In order to ascertain the impact of the new juice shop and other inuential factors, Quirk Team decided to look into the juice shop market.
Juice shops sell a variety of products, the most common (and obvious) being juice, milkshakes and sandwiches. They combine that with cigarettes, tea, and flexible credit to maximize business. And as is evidenced by the existence of six juice shops on the road from Gate 0 to Surya, all of them are doing pretty well.
The oldest juice shop nearby is Juice Junction. He opened shop in 2006, and boasts of the most experience in the refined art of extracting juice from fruits. With a workforce comprising of five workers, he also has the fastest service. Another USP had been the generator that he has, which would allow him to provide juice in a blackout, giving him a monopoly in times of darkness. But it no longer aids his business, as other juice shops have procured generators as well. He also claims that no one can match his fruit bowls or chocolate shakes. We leave it to the connoisseurs to determine the truth of that statement.
Right opposite Juice Junction is the six months-old Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre (yes, it is important that you know the name. The lady at the counter was adamant about the name and the blue board). Their USP is a chaat stall that has been opened. Since several people on campus have complained of the lack of good chaat anywhere nearby, we suggest you sample the same. Tell us how it is and then we shall try it. They, according to one our editors, have the best apple juice among all of these juice shops.
The much maligned Pratham works at the Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre, the one with the green board. His shop has been around for seven years. So the next time Pratham tells you that his is the oldest juice shop on the street, you can throw Juice Junction’s existence at him. That won’t really knock him off his perch, though. He has three girlfriends. He feels very cool. When we asked him about the dynamics at play between and how his business was impacted because of the new competition in the market, he laughed us off. A little pestering and a promise to frequent his juice shop yielded results. The assumption that we had worked with was that the juice market was a fiercely competitive one, which we soon learned was not accurate. What Pratham gladly told us was that there were enough customers to allow all the juice shops in the vicinity to operate without having to attempt to undercut each other.
Opposite Pratham and rivalling his business is the “new juice shop,” or Sri Lakshmi Venkateshwara Juice Centre, which opened in March last year. The business was started by three guys, with some of their friends helping out, these friends being the members of the stall that you see in the juice shop. We credit him with making sandwiches a common choice for lunch, as Juice Junction failed to manage this due to its distance from the college gate. However, his sandwiches have taken a hit, losing a substantial part of their customers to Super Rolls, as confirmed by a rather gleeful Pratham.
These new developments point to a highly competitive juice shop market that has seen rapid expansion in the past year. A lot of Law Schoolites have hypothesised that this is creating a bubble which is about to burst. But when we spoke to the owners of these four juice shops, it became fairly clear to us that there are enough juice drinkers on the street to make the juice business a fairly comfortable one for all juice shops. Each one is seeing their business thrive. There is no juice shop bubble. Pratham just likes antagonizing customers, apparently. So the next time you’re at Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre, the one with the green board, call him Umesh. He’ll get annoyed.
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