I counted. Between Sunday night and this morning, forty-one brands wrote to tell me they are grateful for me.
A mattress company. Two airlines. A store I bought a single lamp from in 2016. A cold brew subscription I cancelled in March, still thankful, still writing.
Most of them run the same three moves. A photograph of a table with too many gourds on it. An opening line about gathering with the people who matter most. And then, four lines down, thirty percent off with code THANKS30.
Which is the whole problem, visible in one scroll.
Gratitude is a relationship word. It requires that one specific person did something for another specific person, and that the second person noticed. When you send it to four hundred thousand people at nine in the morning on a schedule locked in September, you have not expressed gratitude. You have executed a campaign that borrows the vocabulary of gratitude because that vocabulary tests well in subject lines.
Sincerity does not scale, and every attempt to scale it reads as exactly what it is.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Nobody sets out to be insincere. What happens is that the calendar has a slot, the slot is named Thanksgiving, and somebody has to fill it by Friday. The brief says warm. The brief says human. Nobody asks the only question that matters, which is whether this brand did anything this year that earns it the right to say thank you.
Some did. Patagonia can talk about what its customers funded, because its customers actually funded it, and the numbers are public, and the sentence works whether or not it is November. REI does not send a gratitude email. It closes the stores. The message is the same either way: here is something we gave up for you.
The rest of us are sending a coupon in a cardigan.
If you are going to write one anyway, and you probably are, because it is on the calendar, then narrow it until it is true. Thank people for something specific that happened. Name the number. Name the year. Do not thank the entire list for being a valued part of our family. Nobody on a list of four hundred thousand has ever once believed they were family, and the sentence spends a little credibility you are going to want in January, when you have something real to say and nobody left who trusts the sender.
The rest of us are sending a coupon in a cardigan.
Truffles and Barnaby express gratitude roughly twice a year, both times at four in the morning, both times to a can opener. It is not a scalable model. It is also the most convincing thanks anyone in this house has ever given, and I have never once doubted that they meant it.