REVERSAL OF FORTUNE:: A salesman works lazily as there was no customer in the outlet even before the Muslims\' biggest festival Eid in a sheer misfortune to the greetings card printing industry. The picture was taken on Monday from a city greetings card s
Gone are the days of expressing one's feelings to his or her beloved ones through greetings cards. Now technology, especially mobile telephony, has displaced that emotional mode of expression.
Even a decade ago, millions of people used to express New Year, Eid or festivals' greetings to their near and dear ones by posting a card or by hand delivery. They are now using short message services (SMS) of cellphones or e-mails instead.
The technological advancement has helped people reduce time and cost of expression, but impacted business of selling greetings and view cards.
According to the industry people, millions of greeting cards would have been sold during Eid and puja festivals, New Year, Christmas and other national or religious occasions, which have now come down to a few thousands round the year.
After visits to a number of outlets in the city, this correspondent found that staffs of the stores were passing idle time, whereas other businesses were more or less busy with their festival business.
"Our business has thrived printing and selling of cards. This was our major business till 2005, which we can imagine now. This is a misfortune-not only for us, but also for the whole industry," director of Azad Products (Pvt) Ltd Ziaur Rahman Azad told the FE Sunday.
"Our sale of greetings cards were around 30-40 million in a year, which have now come down to only around 20, 000," he added.
"Now-a-days, people can reach thousands just in a click at lower or not cost. Why should they face botheration of manual exchange of wishes?" he asked.
Mr Azad, however, said that the sales of official cards are still in practice, though it is also shrinking gradually.
"The culture of exchanging greeting cards by officials is still in practice but on a small scale. We are now concentrating more on selling of calendars, diaries and wedding cards for sustainability," Mr Azad informed.
Nazrul Islam Khan, manager of Ideal Products, another leading company in the sector said people would stand in queue in their showrooms to buy gift cards ahead of Eid a decade ago, now-a-days they pass time gossiping among themselves.
"We are still alive only because of our large sale of calendars, diaries, and different types of khata, pads and wedding cards," he added.
However, after a visit to different book shops and departmental stores, the FE correspondent found that the stores were selling different types of imported view cards to the children on which cartoons like Pokemon, Cinderella, Disney, Tom & Jerry, City of Angle and a few other popular characters of satellite television serials for kids were printed. According to the shopkeepers, most of these view cards are imported from China.
Managing Director of Jamuna Products Nazrul Islam Munshi said they cannot compete with China both in terms of quality and price.
"We are also selling view cards to the children on a limited scale. We import art paper from China, so if we try to compete with them, we will not succeed," he said.
"If the government increases duty on import of such cards, only then it will be possible for us to compete with China," he added.
However, the downtrend in manual exchange of greetings is also evident in the postal services.
Post offices would receive more than a million festival cards for posting both at home and abroad against which they made substantial amount of profit, which is now a thing of the past, according to a senior official of Bangladesh Post Office.
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