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cardsharp
Time To Roll Our
Sleeves Up! By the time you read this, card and gift shops as well as others selling ‘nonessentiaI’ items, will be on the verge of opening. Not before time, reflects Cardsharp as he turns his thoughts to how long it will be before ‘the new normal’ phrase becomes an annoyance as people just want to get on with things. As Cardsharp writes this he is listening to the Radio 4 Today news programme and getting increasingly annoyed. Dominic ‘Cumminsgate’ seems to be the only topic of discussion, while a much more important issue to his mind has hardly had a mention. This was the announcement that nonessential shops would now not be allowed to open until June 15, not June 1 as was widely anticipated. This will mean that card and gift shops will be open for business a full month after garden centres and DIY stores, and incredibly two weeks after car showrooms open! Where is the logic in that? Are shiny new cars considered more essential than the everyday greeting card, ponders Cardsharp? Or is it that the mediocre middle-aged male politicians that seem to dominate the cabinet see new cars as a symbol of the UK economy’s virility, while greeting cards are viewed as a bit ‘girly’?
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
Once again, to Cardsharp anyway, this reflects a serious lack of joinedup thinking. Most garden centre greeting card displays and departments are even more tightly packed in than many a card shop, so where is the difference on a public health and safety issue. Having had the major Spring Season greeting card buying event of Mother’s Day almost destroyed by the lockdown and Easter card sales were decimated, many card retailers were quite rightly hoping that a June 1 opening would at least give them a decent three week run up to Father’s Day on June 22. With the re-opening deadline pushed back a fortnight to June 15, how do card retailers respond? Is it worth putting together window displays and lots of Father’s Day stock out, if the majority of
Above: Just as David Low emptomised in his historic cartoon during the Second World War, now’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. Below: Social distancing outside a Sainsbury’s store at a time when the elderly are given priority.
the sales will have been snapped up already by the supermarkets, CTN’s and garden centres? Cardsharp accepts that we can’t expect the government to shape their policy to suit the greeting card industry, but given the positive role played by greeting cards during the crisis (just think of the 160,000 cards sent to Colonel Tom for his 100th birthday, for starters) it would have been gratifying to receive some acknowledgement and consideration.. We, in the greeting card industry and in retail are certainly going to need some joined-up thinking in the months to come from Government. Firstly, Cardsharp is completely baffled by some of the five tests for lockdown. The Government seems to be hiding behind ‘scientific evidence’ to evade responsibility for some of its decisions. But scientists can’t seem to agree on anything more than the politicians can? Although most seem to think there is little scientific basis for the two-metre rule, this seems to be the one thing the Government seems to be resolutely sticking to! Every retailer Cardsharp has spoken to has said that the two metre rule is unworkable in most shops. The cost of staff monitoring entry and the amount of transactions that can be done, with so few