April 27, 2023 • 17 mins
Retail reports. Hallmark greeting cards inside Dollar Tree stores. Greetings Gazette offer greeting card news with stories from Progresive Grocer, FOX News, & Kansas City Journal plus related stock maket tips. A full retail report of Hallmark greeting cards inside Dollar Tree stores
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Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Welcome to Greetings Gazette, your greetingcard industry podcast. Our monthly show covers
news, tips and tricks of thegreeting card industry and is proudly sponsored by
intergreet dot com wholesale greeting cards.Good morning, This is Rich McGregor from
Los Angeles. The weather is absolutelybeautiful, sunny and about seventy two degrees.
(00:30):
And now I want to point outI've been in the greeting card and
allied industries for nearly fifty years.Yes, it could be true to say
that I've spent my whole life lookingat greeting cards, gift bags and their
displays and greetings. From Vancouver,British Columbia, Columbia, Canada. I'm
(00:52):
Paul Chase. It's cloudy, it'srainy, it's nine degrees celsius, and
I've been in the reading card industryfor twenty two years, so somewhat of
an expert in the industry. We'vegot some referrals who have filled out the
form on the Greetings Becausette website.Kevin Hallward, who's opening an independent grocer
(01:18):
store in New Jersey. He's sellingfood, bear liquor, wine and cigarettes
plus grocery items, and he's alsolooking to sell greeting cards. So I
imagine you'll have a greeting card isle. And I've forwarded your information to integreet
dot com who will be able tohelp you. Also, Wilma Rodgers from
(01:42):
Toronto, Canada is opening a greetingcard store for tourists. She sells gifts
and novelty items, postcards, giftbags, and she wants a greeting card
island. And we'll be having oneof our reps contact to out in Canada.
(02:04):
Okay, well I have a contacthere too, Keen Godly of Miami
Beach, Florida. He's buying aflorist store and he's thinking about adding a
line of greeting cards. That's agood idea there. Okay, now over
do you, Paul, Just togive you thanks, Rich, just to
(02:27):
give you a bit of a previewwhere we've got some news stories, we've
got a stock market tips, andwe've got a retail report that's Dollar Tree.
So it should be a really interestingshow here from my greeting card users
to do like obvious out of ProgressiveGrocer, that's a magazine that grocery stores
(02:53):
read. And this story is abouta white label e commerce platform called e
Grocery and it's spelled egi ow growscry. It's a play on the words
grocery. And they have integrated Cardisleinto their white label website. And what
(03:17):
a white label website is you canit's designed for grocery stores. And what
they do is they add their logoand add their store colors and it looks
like that independent grocer store has theirown website, but really it's running a
lot of the items for sale andit's running on the background of e Grocery.
(03:43):
It's like Shopify, but it's specificallyfor grocery stores and that being in
the business of helping our retailers differentiatethemselves from larger chains. And what it's
doing is it's adding green teen cardswhere personalized greeting cards. In particular,
(04:03):
where what's going to happen is acustomer will come online to buy some groceries
from that independent grocer and they willalso be able to add greeting cards from
a company called Cardal, which isa handcuated selection of greeting cards, and
they can then pick up those greetingcards from the store of the grocery store.
(04:26):
The grocery store actually prints those cardsout. It's it's a real breakthrough
an online shopping and so it wasinteresting. It is interesting. So E
Grocery and Cardle have teamed up togetherwith a solution to help grocery stores sell
grieting cards online. Okay, well, I've got some news here too,
(04:53):
for from the Kansas City Business Journal, and and it's a little bit of
a sad news is that Kansas Citybased Hallmark Cards a recently trimdous walk workforce
through a mix of layoffs and voluntarybuyouts. Seems to be yeah, it
(05:15):
seems to be a part of theof what's happening. But Hallmark employed about
thirty thousand worldwide in two thousand andnineteen, but by twenty twenty two that
figure had dropped more than twenty thousand, and last year it sells us here
that they employed about four thousand,two hundred and fifty three local full time
(05:42):
equivalent employees. So that cutting backand that's not good. The other news
I have here is that the PostalService is upping the first class stamp prices
to sixty six cents and they're blaminginflation. And I've loved this news from
(06:04):
Fox Business. Okay, but theyare really pushing the price of stamps up.
They pushed them up from sixty tosixty three cents in January and now
they're wanting to put them up tosixty six cents in July. So this
(06:30):
is making it very difficult for thegreeting card industry because they're really having to
you know, when you think aboutmailing a card to someone, then it's
going to be very very difficult.Just becoming more expensive, it is,
and this is fueling inflation. Andof course the inflation is out of control.
(06:56):
And I know that when I goto the Superman market, I will
see that many prices ten twenty,thirty, forty percent, and people are
seem to be able to get awaywith it, and so they do it.
Okay, I've got some stock marketnews. The stock that I've picked
(07:20):
for greeting cards as a retailer calledDollar Tree and Dollar Tree is an American
multi price point chain of discount stores. It's a variety store headquartered in Chesapeake,
Chesapeaca, Virginia. It is aFortune five hundred company and operates fifteen
(07:43):
thousand, one hundred and fifteen storesthroughout the forty eight contagious states and US
and Canada. The stores are supportedby a nationwide Logistist network of twenty four
distribution centers, and the Dollar Treestock when I look this up is down
ninety nine cents to a dollar fortytwo, one hundred and forty seven dollars
(08:07):
and ninety cents, and they havea seven dollars and fifteen cent earning per
year. So that's just I don'tknow. I feel like Kramer here letting
folks know about what are the stocks, but I'm not necessarily saying to buy,
but be aware. They do sella lot of greeting cards. Yes,
(08:28):
yeah, well, here's a sponsoredad from greeting from integreek dot com.
Visit integreek dot com wholesale greeting cards. Integreek dot com supplies retailers with
greeting cards for every occasion, season, and style. All high quality product
greeting cards are available as both premiumand discount card lines. A full line
(08:54):
of beautiful greeting card spinners and displaysis also available. Also, select from
our huge selection of gift wrap,gift tissue, and gift bags. Make
integreet your new profit center. Visitintegreek dot com for your best deals on
wholesale greeting cards, and that bringsus to into seasonal reminders Father's Day is
(09:22):
coming. It's June eighteenth in theUSA. In Canada, it's the third
Sunday of June, and over ahundred million units of Father's Day cards will
be sold. There's two billion fathersin the world, seventy five million in
the US, and gifts like bearsocks, coffee tool sets, to fishing
(09:50):
poles. Restaurant gift cards and greetingcards are a very popular item on Father's
Day, so retailers will put outthe fi stay cards on their seasonal display
and there'll be lots of gift shopsselling Father's daying cards. Richard has taken
(10:11):
a trip to Dollar Tree in LosAngeles, California, where they had a
very large Hallmark department. Right,well, thank you, Paul. And
it's rather interesting because I didn't knowthat you were going to do Dollar Tree's
stock market price. But at thesame time, it's an amazing coincidence.
(10:35):
But I went down and visited DollarTree in Los Angeles and they had a
huge Hallmark greeting card department. Matterof factor was massive, about half being
two for one dollar or fifty centseach and the other half being priced at
(10:56):
a dollar. It was an attractivedisplay, high profile, about sixteen ti
years high, and it was wellmerchandised. Now. The thing to remember
that Dollar Tree has over fifteen thousandstores throughout the USA, so they must
(11:16):
move a lot of greeting cards fifteenthousand stores. The thing that struck me
immediately was the way that they hadblended the Spanish titles with the English.
I've never seen that before. Forexample, they may have had sixteen daughter
(11:37):
cards they're mixed in with them wasabout three or four ear I think I've
pronounced abruptly ear cards, which isSpanish per daughter, and so they had
those mixed in. I felt thiswas very creative. I've not seen this
before, and I put myself inthe place of the average shop perhaps has
(12:01):
Spanic and could see the benefits ofhaving Spanish and English anniversary cards or sympathy
or wedding. I liked the ideaand I'm going to try it out myself
in the future to see how itworks. Now, Hallmark had all the
seasons on display, Graduation, Mother'sDay, and Father's Day on display,
(12:28):
as well as the minor seasons ofAdmin Professional Day Communion and others were there
as well. Now, the cardsthemselves were not obviously not all that exciting,
after all, they were made withsevere price considerations, but I was
(12:50):
impressed by them being printed in theUSA, and they obviously filled a need
that two for a dollar cards werepretty a sec but the one dollar cards
were big, bold and well printed. There were three brands in the range,
all Hallmark, of course, butHeartline for the two for one dollar
(13:15):
expressions for the one dollar cards,and scattered among both rangers was their Christian
line Joyfully Yours by Dayspring, whichis a Hallmark subsidiary. Their cards I
would give about six out of ten. Yes, they were well merchandised,
but they were also bring They werealso boring. But what could I I
(13:45):
mean, what could you do forsuch a low price, and they I
think they did it very well.So now the gift bags were obviously not
Hallmark, but a brand called VwallaBah. I think this may be a
brand owned by Dollar Tree, orthey could not sell all the different sizes
(14:07):
of gift bags and boxes for theflat price of a dollar twenty five.
They were poorly displayed, but weregood gift bags at a very low price.
I would give them an overall sixfor quality. This is the gift
bags and boxes and the price,but I've markened down as they were poorly
(14:28):
displayed. In addition, the Voelabrand had all the seasonal cards available Mothers,
Fathers, and graduation all on displaywith handmade cards. They are handmade.
These were in different in a differentsection of the store and displayed in
cardboard displayers. They sell for abuck each. Again, I suspect as
(14:56):
Dollar Try's own brand or they couldnot sell these very attractive handmade cards for
the very modest price of a dollar. I don't know how Hallmark feels about
it, but I'd be very unhappyif a store that I supplied put out
a brand of handmade seasonal cards inopposition to my cards. I expect Hallmark
(15:20):
to have to do major crediting forthe seasonal for the upcoming seasons, as
many of their seasonal cards might remainunsold. And that's the end of my
little thing on Dollar Try. Okay. I have a few after forwards,
(15:41):
and a lot of it has todo with if you've been into a retail
store, you might have seen shoplifters. It's certainly all over the news,
and it's destroying retail. And policeneed to be able to arrest shoplifters,
and the DA needs to secute themat the moment they if they let them
(16:04):
walk out the door and they justdeal, and this country is falling apart
this way. There will be morestores opening and many retailers moving into commercial
real estate if the police are ableto do their jobs. And that's my
thought thought, and I do havea wrap up. If you own a
(16:30):
retail store and are interested in addinggreeting cards to your store, or if
you're opening a new restail store,visit Greetings Gazette dot com and fill out
our form, or you can emailus for any reason at info at Greetings
Gazette dot com. Info at greetingsgazette dot com. Thank you for listening.
(16:52):
Okay, and this is Rich signingoff, and this is Paul and
make sure you follow our podcast.Thank you. Wow
Welcome to Greetings Gazette, your greetingcard industry podcast. Our monthly show covers
news, tips and tricks of thegreeting card industry and is proudly sponsored by
intergreet dot com wholesale greeting cards.Good morning, This is Rich McGregor from
Los Angeles. The weather is absolutelybeautiful, sunny and about seventy two degrees.
(00:30):
And now I want to point outI've been in the greeting card and
allied industries for nearly fifty years.Yes, it could be true to say
that I've spent my whole life lookingat greeting cards, gift bags and their
displays and greetings. From Vancouver,British Columbia, Columbia, Canada. I'm
(00:52):
Paul Chase. It's cloudy, it'srainy, it's nine degrees celsius, and
I've been in the reading card industryfor twenty two years, so somewhat of
an expert in the industry. We'vegot some referrals who have filled out the
form on the Greetings Becausette website.Kevin Hallward, who's opening an independent grocer
(01:18):
store in New Jersey. He's sellingfood, bear liquor, wine and cigarettes
plus grocery items, and he's alsolooking to sell greeting cards. So I
imagine you'll have a greeting card isle. And I've forwarded your information to integreet
dot com who will be able tohelp you. Also, Wilma Rodgers from
(01:42):
Toronto, Canada is opening a greetingcard store for tourists. She sells gifts
and novelty items, postcards, giftbags, and she wants a greeting card
island. And we'll be having oneof our reps contact to out in Canada.
(02:04):
Okay, well I have a contacthere too, Keen Godly of Miami
Beach, Florida. He's buying aflorist store and he's thinking about adding a
line of greeting cards. That's agood idea there. Okay, now over
do you, Paul, Just togive you thanks, Rich, just to
(02:27):
give you a bit of a previewwhere we've got some news stories, we've
got a stock market tips, andwe've got a retail report that's Dollar Tree.
So it should be a really interestingshow here from my greeting card users
to do like obvious out of ProgressiveGrocer, that's a magazine that grocery stores
(02:53):
read. And this story is abouta white label e commerce platform called e
Grocery and it's spelled egi ow growscry. It's a play on the words
grocery. And they have integrated Cardisleinto their white label website. And what
(03:17):
a white label website is you canit's designed for grocery stores. And what
they do is they add their logoand add their store colors and it looks
like that independent grocer store has theirown website, but really it's running a
lot of the items for sale andit's running on the background of e Grocery.
(03:43):
It's like Shopify, but it's specificallyfor grocery stores and that being in
the business of helping our retailers differentiatethemselves from larger chains. And what it's
doing is it's adding green teen cardswhere personalized greeting cards. In particular,
(04:03):
where what's going to happen is acustomer will come online to buy some groceries
from that independent grocer and they willalso be able to add greeting cards from
a company called Cardal, which isa handcuated selection of greeting cards, and
they can then pick up those greetingcards from the store of the grocery store.
(04:26):
The grocery store actually prints those cardsout. It's it's a real breakthrough
an online shopping and so it wasinteresting. It is interesting. So E
Grocery and Cardle have teamed up togetherwith a solution to help grocery stores sell
grieting cards online. Okay, well, I've got some news here too,
(04:53):
for from the Kansas City Business Journal, and and it's a little bit of
a sad news is that Kansas Citybased Hallmark Cards a recently trimdous walk workforce
through a mix of layoffs and voluntarybuyouts. Seems to be yeah, it
(05:15):
seems to be a part of theof what's happening. But Hallmark employed about
thirty thousand worldwide in two thousand andnineteen, but by twenty twenty two that
figure had dropped more than twenty thousand, and last year it sells us here
that they employed about four thousand,two hundred and fifty three local full time
(05:42):
equivalent employees. So that cutting backand that's not good. The other news
I have here is that the PostalService is upping the first class stamp prices
to sixty six cents and they're blaminginflation. And I've loved this news from
(06:04):
Fox Business. Okay, but theyare really pushing the price of stamps up.
They pushed them up from sixty tosixty three cents in January and now
they're wanting to put them up tosixty six cents in July. So this
(06:30):
is making it very difficult for thegreeting card industry because they're really having to
you know, when you think aboutmailing a card to someone, then it's
going to be very very difficult.Just becoming more expensive, it is,
and this is fueling inflation. Andof course the inflation is out of control.
(06:56):
And I know that when I goto the Superman market, I will
see that many prices ten twenty,thirty, forty percent, and people are
seem to be able to get awaywith it, and so they do it.
Okay, I've got some stock marketnews. The stock that I've picked
(07:20):
for greeting cards as a retailer calledDollar Tree and Dollar Tree is an American
multi price point chain of discount stores. It's a variety store headquartered in Chesapeake,
Chesapeaca, Virginia. It is aFortune five hundred company and operates fifteen
(07:43):
thousand, one hundred and fifteen storesthroughout the forty eight contagious states and US
and Canada. The stores are supportedby a nationwide Logistist network of twenty four
distribution centers, and the Dollar Treestock when I look this up is down
ninety nine cents to a dollar fortytwo, one hundred and forty seven dollars
(08:07):
and ninety cents, and they havea seven dollars and fifteen cent earning per
year. So that's just I don'tknow. I feel like Kramer here letting
folks know about what are the stocks, but I'm not necessarily saying to buy,
but be aware. They do sella lot of greeting cards. Yes,
(08:28):
yeah, well, here's a sponsoredad from greeting from integreek dot com.
Visit integreek dot com wholesale greeting cards. Integreek dot com supplies retailers with
greeting cards for every occasion, season, and style. All high quality product
greeting cards are available as both premiumand discount card lines. A full line
(08:54):
of beautiful greeting card spinners and displaysis also available. Also, select from
our huge selection of gift wrap,gift tissue, and gift bags. Make
integreet your new profit center. Visitintegreek dot com for your best deals on
wholesale greeting cards, and that bringsus to into seasonal reminders Father's Day is
(09:22):
coming. It's June eighteenth in theUSA. In Canada, it's the third
Sunday of June, and over ahundred million units of Father's Day cards will
be sold. There's two billion fathersin the world, seventy five million in
the US, and gifts like bearsocks, coffee tool sets, to fishing
(09:50):
poles. Restaurant gift cards and greetingcards are a very popular item on Father's
Day, so retailers will put outthe fi stay cards on their seasonal display
and there'll be lots of gift shopsselling Father's daying cards. Richard has taken
(10:11):
a trip to Dollar Tree in LosAngeles, California, where they had a
very large Hallmark department. Right,well, thank you, Paul. And
it's rather interesting because I didn't knowthat you were going to do Dollar Tree's
stock market price. But at thesame time, it's an amazing coincidence.
(10:35):
But I went down and visited DollarTree in Los Angeles and they had a
huge Hallmark greeting card department. Matterof factor was massive, about half being
two for one dollar or fifty centseach and the other half being priced at
(10:56):
a dollar. It was an attractivedisplay, high profile, about sixteen ti
years high, and it was wellmerchandised. Now. The thing to remember
that Dollar Tree has over fifteen thousandstores throughout the USA, so they must
(11:16):
move a lot of greeting cards fifteenthousand stores. The thing that struck me
immediately was the way that they hadblended the Spanish titles with the English.
I've never seen that before. Forexample, they may have had sixteen daughter
(11:37):
cards they're mixed in with them wasabout three or four ear I think I've
pronounced abruptly ear cards, which isSpanish per daughter, and so they had
those mixed in. I felt thiswas very creative. I've not seen this
before, and I put myself inthe place of the average shop perhaps has
(12:01):
Spanic and could see the benefits ofhaving Spanish and English anniversary cards or sympathy
or wedding. I liked the ideaand I'm going to try it out myself
in the future to see how itworks. Now, Hallmark had all the
seasons on display, Graduation, Mother'sDay, and Father's Day on display,
(12:28):
as well as the minor seasons ofAdmin Professional Day Communion and others were there
as well. Now, the cardsthemselves were not obviously not all that exciting,
after all, they were made withsevere price considerations, but I was
(12:50):
impressed by them being printed in theUSA, and they obviously filled a need
that two for a dollar cards werepretty a sec but the one dollar cards
were big, bold and well printed. There were three brands in the range,
all Hallmark, of course, butHeartline for the two for one dollar
(13:15):
expressions for the one dollar cards,and scattered among both rangers was their Christian
line Joyfully Yours by Dayspring, whichis a Hallmark subsidiary. Their cards I
would give about six out of ten. Yes, they were well merchandised,
but they were also bring They werealso boring. But what could I I
(13:45):
mean, what could you do forsuch a low price, and they I
think they did it very well.So now the gift bags were obviously not
Hallmark, but a brand called VwallaBah. I think this may be a
brand owned by Dollar Tree, orthey could not sell all the different sizes
(14:07):
of gift bags and boxes for theflat price of a dollar twenty five.
They were poorly displayed, but weregood gift bags at a very low price.
I would give them an overall sixfor quality. This is the gift
bags and boxes and the price,but I've markened down as they were poorly
(14:28):
displayed. In addition, the Voelabrand had all the seasonal cards available Mothers,
Fathers, and graduation all on displaywith handmade cards. They are handmade.
These were in different in a differentsection of the store and displayed in
cardboard displayers. They sell for abuck each. Again, I suspect as
(14:56):
Dollar Try's own brand or they couldnot sell these very attractive handmade cards for
the very modest price of a dollar. I don't know how Hallmark feels about
it, but I'd be very unhappyif a store that I supplied put out
a brand of handmade seasonal cards inopposition to my cards. I expect Hallmark
(15:20):
to have to do major crediting forthe seasonal for the upcoming seasons, as
many of their seasonal cards might remainunsold. And that's the end of my
little thing on Dollar Try. Okay. I have a few after forwards,
(15:41):
and a lot of it has todo with if you've been into a retail
store, you might have seen shoplifters. It's certainly all over the news,
and it's destroying retail. And policeneed to be able to arrest shoplifters,
and the DA needs to secute themat the moment they if they let them
(16:04):
walk out the door and they justdeal, and this country is falling apart
this way. There will be morestores opening and many retailers moving into commercial
real estate if the police are ableto do their jobs. And that's my
thought thought, and I do havea wrap up. If you own a
(16:30):
retail store and are interested in addinggreeting cards to your store, or if
you're opening a new restail store,visit Greetings Gazette dot com and fill out
our form, or you can emailus for any reason at info at Greetings
Gazette dot com. Info at greetingsgazette dot com. Thank you for listening.
(16:52):
Okay, and this is Rich signingoff, and this is Paul and
make sure you follow our podcast.Thank you. Wow
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