20-21.qxp_Layout 1 23/02/2022 12:20 Page 2
cardsharp
The Price is
Not Right As Cardsharp is writing this, the announcement had just been made that official Covid restrictions have become a thing of the past in England. Yet, two months ago, it looked like we may have been heading for another lockdown. How quickly we forget, reflected Cardsharp? Now the nation’s chatter turns to the ‘cost of living crisis’ or inflation as Cardsharp’s generation knows it as. And for the first time in many a year, it is hitting the greeting card industry and hitting it hard. Time gives you a sense of perspective. When Cardsharp was a wee nipper in the 1970s, inflation frequently broke the 20% barrier, making our present predicted 6% seem quite puny in comparison. To keep in line the trade unions (then much more powerful and larger than they are today), demanded and in most cases achieved, wage increases in excess of inflation.
Even in the 1980s during the Thatcher era when inflation was supposedly tamed, it regularly ran at between 5%-10% per annum. This was just as the UK greeting card market was really starting to boom and demand was high. And how did the greeting card industry deal with this? Easy! Both publishers and retailers pushed their prices up by around 10% every year. This meant increased profits for everyone and everyone along the supply chain was happy.
20
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
Right: The Price is Right TV game show (upon which this board game was based), hosted by Leslie Crowther first aired in 1984 which saw contestants guess how much items cost. Below left: With inflation in the UK at its 30 year high, the cost of living and how many people are going to cope is a real concern. Below right: During Maggie Thatcher’s era, even though inflation had reduced, it was often still running between 5%-10%.
Because of some strange historical anomaly, the price hike was always announced by two publishers - Paper House (then under Peter Reichwald’s leadership) on the direct to retail side and Photo Productions (now defunct) on the wholesale side. Whatever they did, everyone just followed suit. No one was quite sure why, but they just did. Something to do with them having the dominant price coding that retailers and wholesalers tended to use. The consistent and constant annual price increase of greeting cards did not stop the public lapping them up, until the late 1980s when you started to hear moans from some of the general public about the price of cards “£1.50 for a folded bit of card!” Cardsharp sensed even then that things might change.
Today, soccer fans watching Manchester United live on television, will be familiar when the camera focuses on their legendary ex-manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, sitting up in the director’s box. It is usually at a time of United’s maximum discomfort, and the commentator usually asks the rhetorical question, what would Sir Alex have done in this situation? And invariably sitting close by on his right-hand side, is a familiar face. This man is Ron Wood, the ultimate Man Utd nut, and the person who arguably single-handledly changed the pricing of greeting cards on the high street. Ron was a young greeting card wholesaler, who had clocked the huge improvement in the quality of wholesale publishers’ greeting cards, in particular those of the holy trinity of Simon Elvin, Kingsley Cards, and Hambledon Studios. With the financial assistance of a couple of his Man U. footballing mates, in particular its then captain Bryan Robson, he set about building a national chain of card
