Yeah-- there's always someone who doesn't like whatever swag they give out but the cost is nominal. I'm organizing the company Halloween party. I'm snagging a couple hundred out of the budget to buy everyone -- even people who don't show up-- a plastic cup with the logo.
Now I'm sure some will hate it but I'm counting on most folks thinking it was a nice thing to get everyone especially since we have a free soda fountain in the break room and we go through 150+ paper cups daily.
I still occasionally wear one of the tshirts I got 8 years ago when I worked for a phone company. Admittedly it's just a shirt for yardwork now, but it fits and I still use it. Frankly I looked forward to the yearly gift and used the heck out of it (except the one year they got a stupid, trendy windbreaker--- but then no one wore those).
Those cameras in the example that started this mess. Depending on your volume they probably cost all of a couple bucks each. I recently bought a bunch of kodak disposables for work and paid less than $5 each and I only bought a couple dozen. Had I purchased in lots of 100 or more the price would have dropped off rapidly. In all likelihood HR managed to land a really cheap lot (especially if they bought some expired or nearly expired ones on ebay) and decided it was a good way to get people's attention for their f-ing survey.
Personally the times I get irritated about companies spending money on useless crap its when they make everyone go through one of those 'personality assessment' courses where some 'expert' tries to teach you some overly simplistic way to pigeonhole people into neat little boxes and label them so you don't have to actually treat them like dynamic, complex beings and instead can execute a series of cookie cutter responses based on those labels.
Those frickin' personality assessment grids/continuiums/targets/quadrants/courses cost the company thousands and are nothing more than ways for incompetent managers to judge people who don't respond well to their leadership. Oh-- and they make the company selling them the 'service' a couple hundred per manager.
Every time I see one of those personality assessment things come up I want to ask them to fire the bad managers and give the remaining managers a bonus equal to the crappy course was going to cost.
