Peter Viney's Blog

As an author, greetings cards make me seethe with resentment. You can only get £7.99 retail for a 400 page paperback with a beautifully illustrated glossy cover. If you take out and discard the 400 pages of text, and print a few trite words on the inside of the remaining glossy cover, you have the equivalent of a greetings card and can charge £2.99 for it.

65% of greetings cards are bought by women. If I look at my birthday cards in any given year, nearly all are from female relatives and friends. The guys don’t send them. Fair enough, I don’t send them cards either. If you hear a cry of “Great! Look! A card shop!” in the High Street, the chances are it will be soprano rather than baritone. The behaviour of women and men in a card shop is different too. If you stand in one for any length of time, you observe that those quietly browsing are female, while the odd male darts in, looks, chooses, pays, and is out in two minutes. There is a serious discrepancy in communication here. You can bet that the woman who spends fifteen minutes agonizing over the right wording and picture for someone, will apply a similarly searching analysis on the cards she receives. A woman might say, ‘That’s the nicest card I’ve seen in years!’ Her male companion’s reply will be, ‘Great! Buy five. You can send one for the next five birthdays.’ Oh, dear. It doesn’t work like that.

Those silk padded A3 sized greetings cards in a box, with pink teddy bears, cute puppies, or hearts on them are bought by males, in the mistaken belief that high price will outweigh lack of appropriacy or forethought. Late-night petrol service stations do a good trade in them, as well as in those apology-gesture cut flowers, delivered daily from Holland in massive articulated trucks. Once I was looking for a CD for my sister’s birthday in a large record store, and selected her the new Norah Jones as well as a copy for myself. The sales assistant, who knew me, asked why I wanted two copies. I said one was a birthday present and he whistled in dismay, ‘You can’t give it as a birthday present. It’s in the top twenty!’ he said. He went on to explain that any CDs or DVDs that are in the Top Twenty, as gifts, look as if they’re a last minute panic buy, in a supermarket or motorway services shop. I bought a Windham Hill piano selection instead.

Man + Greetings Cards

Women buy cards for future possible use, and have a selection at home to choose from. Men buy them the day before they’re needed. I often spend time waiting in card shops, and like the other males, I gravitate to the humour section. I enjoy the ever changing selections. Just this week I laughed out loud at the retro painting of Goldilocks staring into her bowl of porridge with the speech bubble, ‘I hope it’s organic!’ Next to it was a truculent retro baby bear staring at his porridge bowl with ‘Oh, no! I wanted Shreddies!’I can cheerfully spend ten minutes looking at the jokes, surprising myself at the ever-increasing crudity. The F-word first appeared on displays several years ago. Recently, you can find both “Happy birthday, C***!’ and ‘Happy birthday, you c***!’ which would have had a shop owner arrested twenty years ago as obscene publications. (There’s an interesting little punctuation point in why the first has a capital C.)

I was in a small card shop with a superb and original collection recently, and asked how many cards in the humour selection actually sold. The shop owner smiled, ‘Oh, we sell quite a lot. The very crude ones are chosen for people in the same workplace most often, but really the purpose of the humour section is to keep men quietly occupied whilst their female companions browse and buy lots of cards.’