It looks like greeting cards are another thing we're cutting back on lately; American Greetings has announced that sales fell 14 percent in the last quarter. [Associated Press]
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I hope they get well soon.
Maybe they would get more business if they started making cards that actually attempted to reflect the realities of modern relationships. Sorry, Hallmark et al., but my father is *not* the crude burly barrel-chested sports-loving amateur mechanic pictured on all of your Dad-related cards. Nor does my mother much care for sassy pink hearts outlining some banal sweeping generalization about how much she and I share with each other.
I've long since thought that greeting card companies should do away with the entire model of pre-printed emotions. Instead of having four rows of cards that all fail to say what *I* want to say, why not have a single kiosk that lets me quickly design and print the card I want? Let me choose from a database of cover images (including photographs, cartoons, and pseudo-paintings), let me customize the text on both the cover page and the interior, then print it out on high-quality cardstock, pre-folded, with your company logo on the back as always.
Until you do that, you'll keep losing my business to Kinko's.
I am unsure why they think a card, regardless of its sentiments, should be $4.99 plus tax. Look inward, American Greetings.
@Lokys: The only problem with that is you now have cards that could say anything and bear the Hallmark logo. When I was in college, we got a friend who went home for spring break a cake that said "Go back to Arizona". I could come up with far more inappropraite things to put on a card.
Maybe they would make more money if the cards weren't so expensive.
I've stopped sending regular greeting cards and use someecards.com instead. Regular greeting cards are just not funny enough, especially Mother's Day cards. Hey, Hallmark, my mom has a sense of humor!
Greeting Cards are just stupid, maybe people realized that?
Good riddance to greeting cards. Maybe next they will do away with the holidays. If we fail to spend this Christmas, will it go away? Probably not.....sigh.
$3.95 to say 'Love you, Mom'?? No thanks. I can tell her in person FOR FREE.
They should start making cards dealing with the recession and then their business would be booming!