What Is It With High-Priced Greeting Cards?
Oddly enough, given the fact I probably watch the Hallmark Channel more than any other cable channel (at least during the Christmas season), they really don't do a lot of cross-selling which I find puzzling. None (or few) of those heart-tugging plugs about a retiring teacher who finds out she inspired her own students to seek out an education career or the like. I don't hear a lot of plugs for their branded card shops, other products like ornaments (beyond, say, a heavily promoted reveal), etc.For years, probably due to a tight budget, I often resorted to boxed cards. For a few years, I used to buy Guidepost cards, which are more like leaflets with religious art, inspirational stories, etc. Sam's Club has carried these cards with attached elements, e.g., not a painted tree but a tree image embedded with the card. As the extended family grew (I have 6 younger siblings and 21 nephews and nieces and a double-digit number of grandnephews and grandnieces), just the postage alone was staggering (not to mention I often sent the kids cards for Valentine's Day, Easter, and birthdays.) For budget reasons over the last 15 years, I've cut the mailing list to my nuclear family (mother and siblings; Dad died a few years back) and a few older relatives on my Mom's side (my last paternal relative passed in September). For some relatives like my Mom and aunts/uncles, I started buying individual theme (to my Mom, a Favorite Aunt and Uncle, etc.) cards some time back.
Maybe one day I'll end up following my maternal grandfather/godfather's example and make an annual trip to a card shop to buy the coming year's worth of cards. However, he used to ask the saleslady for help in picking out cards, which isn't my style at all.
It won't surprise my readers to know that I'm a critic of most greeting card verses; quite frankly, I usually find they really suck, and I can write better stuff in my sleep. So I end up spending more time than I should picking out the least objectionable ones.
I recently spent some time picking out (yes! Hallmark) cards for my mailing list. (And you can also pick up stamps at Walmart customer service, one of the beautiful aspects of one-stop shopping.) Every once in a while I'll go through a price shock. For instance, I hadn't been to a fast food place in years; at the time I remember the price of a combo meal in the range of $3.50-4.25 or so. It was a few years later I ended up going to a Burger King in the process of moving (so my refrigerator was cleaned out and everything else boxed up), and I found out just a regular combo price had almost doubled from what I last remembered.
Now I realize that there were premium-priced cards from the past which might include a recording chip for personalized messages or a clip of some classic Christmas hit song, ribbons, embedded elements, etc. But this season I was just looking for simple "brother and sister-in-law" or "sister and family" cards, no special gimmicks, and these cards seemed to be priced in the $4 - $7 range each. I remember being able to buy a box of cards for that price. Not only that, but the list prices were weird, like $4.97 (vs. say $4.50 or $5). So I racked up about $40 in cards for maybe 9 people. It isn't I can't afford to do this once in a while, but I could buy a lot of pizza to feed a group of people at that price.
I thought WalMart discounted its greeting cards (but I could be thinking of other discount chains or maybe military base/post exchanges (my Dad was a retired USAF Master Sergeant, and I often went there with him, plus my Mom used to work there)), but they rang up at full list price. No premium like buy 3 cards and get a little stuffed animal for your new baby grandniece. Oh, they did have a section of budget cards, say in the $1-$3 range/
Incidentally I've flirted with the idea of coming up with my own cards. (It isn't as far-fetched as it might seem. I published a few poems in my high school and college years. In fact, it turns out OLL publicized it and never told me about it; one day I walked about a bulletin board down a hallway and saw a brief blurb about an OLL poet published. Don't tell anybody--I stole the clipping for my scrapbook.) My own family doesn't think much of the idea (not that they've ever seen a prototype); they just think, like the acting profession, it's too competitive. I do what other people think is impossible all the time.
The Cable Holiday Movies
My (nearly 6 month) new cable channel mix is rather unusual; it doesn't include any sports channels or a number of channels I normally see bundled, like TNT and TBS. Usually I've also had two Hallmark channels, the other being Movies & Mysteries. (Hallmark is also promoting a third channel, Drama, plus its own Internet network of movies/shows on demand.) The second channel is not bundled with my current service.The reason this annoys me is that for Hallmark's Countdown to Christmas, it basically divides its Christmas movies into separate tracks: the original channel has the "romantic comedies", while M&M has the more traditional and/or dramatic movies. Both channels offer one or 2 new cable movies each weekend during the season. My issue is that a number of my favorites, e.g., "Farewell, Mr. Kringle", "A Christmas Visitor", "Angels and Ornaments", "Angel in the Family", and "Christmas With Holly", are on the channel I can't access. Some of the content on Hallmark Channel is in heavy rotation; I do realize they want to differentiate content, but in their shoes, I might do some cross-promotion of content rather than risk boring viewers. I remember raising Hallmark Channel with my Mom a few years back, and her response was basically there's a lot of repetition. [On a side note, while some of the content above has been released to DVD, certain titles like "Farewell, Mr. Kringle" don't seem to have been, at least the last time I checked.]
Hallmark really doesn't do the old favorites and that may be due to exclusive licensing deals (like "It's a Wonderful Life" with NBC-family networks, which I've caught twice this season on the USA network). I'll probably catch "White Christmas" on AMC later tonight. Lifetime and Ion also releases fresh movies on weekends. To be honest, I haven't really seen anything this season that has caught my attention like those listed above, although "The Christmas Train" has a nice little swerve ending. It's a shame that some of these networks haven't tried to update the original classics (including "A Christmas Carol") with some imaginative twists.
I may have some story ideas, which I've already said that I won't publish in a free blog; hopefully, I'll make time over the coming year to develop.
