Americans are mailing fewer greeting cards

Washington Post

WASHINGTON — It’s the middle of December, and Peg Willingham wants to know: Where are all the Christmas cards?

“I’ve only gotten about four,” said the Falls Church, Va., mother as she tabulated the meager pile in the little, red basket that serves as her card caddy each year. “Normally, I’d have a pretty-full basket by now, at least 15 or 20 cards. I’m trying not to take it too personally.”

She shouldn’t. This season is shaping up as a ho-ho-hum year for holiday cards, at least the kind you can collect in a little red basket. Even the post office has noticed a significant thinning of the usual torrent of festive envelopes.

For the first two weeks of December, said Postal Service spokesman Michael Woods, “we are seeing about an 11 percent decrease in first-class cancellations from last year, which is a good proxy for the number of cards and letters coming through the system.”

And though last-minute mailers are still adding to all those waiting baskets and refrigerator doors, there are signs that plenty of people are giving hard-copy greetings a complete pass this time around.

“We see a 10 to 15 percent decline in the overall volume of mailed paper greeting cards this year,” said Neil Hendry, of Datamonitor, a New York-based retail analysis firm. “There are two principle reasons: technology and the economy.”

Observers say a perfect winter storm may have formed to suppress this year’s holiday mail surge: an unemployment rate that makes a roll of 44-cent stamps one more difficult expense for many people (and adds up to a bleak Christmas letter for friends and family); increasingly popular and cheap (or free) Internet alternatives, such as e-cards and Facebook; and heightened environmental concerns that have some people weighing the carbon footprint of all those cardboard Season’s Greetings.

The card-makers’ trade group says it sees nothing amiss, based on an informal survey of Hallmark, American Greetings and other industry leaders. “It might be down slightly, but generally speaking, it seems relatively the same as last year,” said Barbara Miller, spokeswoman for the Greeting Card Association.

But retailers have a different view, and they see a shift away from cards. Although megacard-seller Wal-Mart wouldn’t comment on sales for the season, Joshua Thomas, a spokesman for Target, said his company isn’t selling as many as usual.

“Sales of boxed-set holiday cards were not as strong as last year,” he said, adding that the cheapest bulk packs of cards are holding their own. “We’re definitely seeing the trend of consumers’ going online to fulfill their holiday-card needs.”

Area printers also say they have seen the demand for custom cards fall as law firms and other businesses trim the trimmings.

Beth Charbonneau, 35, a psychotherapist from College Park, Md., decided to opt out of sending cards this year.

With a busy practice, a 2-year-old daughter and an onslaught of visiting relations expected in days, Charbonneau reluctantly swapped a holiday-greetings model dating back to the 1800s for this four-sentence posting on Facebook: “Dear Everyone, Please consider this your holiday card for the year. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Yule, and so on. Sorry to be a lame friend but, really, I’m just not Superwoman. I admit defeat on holiday cards.”