Social media among threats to greeting card makers

HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Say it’s your birth­day or you’ve just had a baby, maybe got engaged or bought your first house. If you’re like many Amer­i­cans, your friends are tex­ting their con­grat­u­la­tions, send­ing you an e-card or click­ing “Like” on your Face­book wall.

But how many will send a paper greet­ing card?

“I’m really, really bad at it,” said Melissa Uhl. The 25-year-old nanny from Kansas City, Mo., hears from friends largely through Face­book. “Maybe,” she said, “an e-card from my mom.”

Once a sta­ple of birth­days and hol­i­days, paper greet­ing cards are fewer and far­ther between — now seen as some­thing spe­cial, instead of some­thing that’s required. The cul­tural shift is a wor­ri­some chal­lenge for the nation’s top card maker, Hall­mark Cards Inc., which last week announced it will close a Kansas plant that made one-third of its greet­ing cards. In con­sol­i­dat­ing its Kansas oper­a­tions, Kansas City-based Hall­mark plans to shed 300 jobs.

Pete Bur­ney, Hallmark’s senior vice pres­i­dent who over­seas pro­duc­tion, says “com­pe­ti­tion in our indus­try is indeed for­mi­da­ble” and that “con­sumers do have more ways to con­nect dig­i­tally and online and through social media.”

Over the past decade, the num­ber of greet­ing cards sold in the U.S. has dropped from 6 bil­lion to 5 bil­lion annu­ally, by Hallmark’s esti­mates. The Greet­ing Card Asso­ci­a­tion, an indus­try trade group based in White Plains, N.Y., puts the overall-sold fig­ure at 7 billion.

Brian Sword, 34, of Kansas City, said he’s “def­i­nitely” buy­ing and receiv­ing fewer printed cards than he did a decade ago, though he still prefers to send them to — and receive them from — a small group of close friends and family.

“I do think there are a lot of ben­e­fits and it does say more when it comes in a paper card for­mat than when it comes even as an online greet­ing card,” Sword said. “There’s just some­thing about receiv­ing that card in the mail and open­ing it up and hav­ing it be a phys­i­cal card.”

Even the paper cards peo­ple buy have changed. Many peo­ple now use online photo sites to upload images and write their own greet­ings. High-end paper stores are attract­ing cus­tomers who design their own cards, some­times using graph­ics soft­ware once avail­able only to professionals.

“What Hall­mark started with met the needs of the con­sumers in that early 20th cen­tury period to mass pro­duce these per­sonal greet­ing cards with art and poems and the only way you could com­mu­ni­cate was by mail essen­tially,” said Pam Danziger, who ana­lyzes the indus­try as pres­i­dent of Stevens, Pa.-based Unity Mar­ket­ing. “It’s no sur­prise that in the 21st cen­tury with so many other com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehi­cles avail­able that the old idea of a greet­ing card being sent by mail just doesn’t work anymore.”

Accord­ing to a U.S. Postal Ser­vice study, cor­re­spon­dence such as greet­ing cards fell 24 per­cent between 2002 and 2010. Invi­ta­tions alone dropped nearly 25 per­cent just between 2008 and 2010. The sur­vey attrib­uted the decline to “chang­ing demo­graph­ics and new tech­nolo­gies,” adding that younger house­holds “both send and receive fewer pieces of cor­re­spon­dence mail because they tend to be early adap­tors of new and faster com­mu­ni­ca­tion media.”

While Hall­mark says it’s com­mit­ted to the paper greet­ing card, it has made changes over the years. It has an iPhone app, for exam­ple, that lets peo­ple buy and mail cards from their phones. It also part­nered with online card ser­vice Shut­ter­fly to share designs that con­sumers can use to build spe­cial­ized cards online.

Its chief rival, Cleve­land, Ohio-based Amer­i­can Greet­ings, actu­ally went from trim­ming costs and jobs amid the reces­sion to announc­ing in August that it’s adding 125 work­ers to an Osce­ola, Ark., plant. It’s part of an expan­sion that will allow cus­tomers to design their own cards — online, of course.

Judith Mar­tin, author of the syn­di­cated Miss Man­ners col­umn, says she thinks the move away from mass-produced sen­ti­ment isn’t all bad.

“The most for­mal sit­u­a­tions still require some­thing writ­ten,” she said. “The least for­mal are eas­ily taken care of with tex­ting or email, which is ter­rific. The idea that it has to be all one or all the other and that one method is totally out of date and the other one takes over until the next thing comes along just impov­er­ishes the ways that we can use these dif­fer­ent things.”

Amanda Holm­boe, a 25-year-old power plant qual­ity con­trol worker from Port­land, Ore., has mixed feel­ings about the rise of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. She said her friends email, text or post some­thing on Face­book when some­thing big hap­pens in her life.

“More peo­ple know about my life and what’s going on. I hear from more peo­ple, so in some ways I’m con­nected to more peo­ple, but it’s a less per­sonal con­nec­tion,” she said.

But Holm­boe isn’t giv­ing up on cards.

“I love send­ing cards,” she said, adding that she mails some from the cities where she trav­els for work. “I think they’re fun, and I like being able to write a per­sonal note to some­body because I like get­ting mail, so I guess I just think every­one likes get­ting mail.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.