The Everywhere blog

It's no secret that we here at Everywhere have a soft spot for postcards -- We use them as a travel metaphor both on the everywheremag.com website (where they function like comments about places) and in the magazine (where there's a whole section devoted to "travel snapshots with a story to tell"). We know that postcards -- the literal kind -- have become a bit archaic, but we didn't realize that they're on the brink of extinction. Check out this article from last weekend's San Francisco Chronicle:

The postcard, that cheap and venerable souvenir for the last 120 years, is slowly but inexorably fading from the scene.

Blame it on the surging popularity of digital photos, text messages and those 5,000-word dispatches e-mailed to weary friends and family from Internet cafes the world over.

Also encroaching on postcards' erstwhile territory are souvenir shot glasses, key chains and commemorative magnets - not to mention Planet Hollywood T-shirts and Hard Rock Cafe baseball caps.

The slow demise of the postcard can be traced in the evolving name of one trade association: In the 1970s it was founded as the Post Card Distributors Association of North America. But by the late 1990s, postcard sales accounted for only 27.5 percent of members' global sales. By 2003, the number had slipped to just 12 percent, and the group's name had become the Post Card & Souvenir Distributors Association. Today the organization's president, Steve King, said he wouldn't be surprised if postcard sales are less than 10 percent.

At their annual convention last September, members voted to drop "Post Card" from the name entirely. It will now be known as Souvenir Wholesale Distributors.

"That couldn't have happened even five years ago," King says. "Postcards were considered a common bond among the members."

At Smith Novelty Company in San Francisco, the largest West Coast distributor of postcards and souvenirs, Brett Rankin, senior vice president of sales and marketing, offers a couple of reasons for the postcard's waning popularity.

"People are lazy. They don't write letters like our grandparents' generation did," he said. "It's a generational thing. It's easy to take a picture of yourself at the Golden Gate Bridge with your camera phone and e-mail it to a friend. In five seconds, it's done."

This is sad, of course. There's something iconic about sharing the representation of a place on the front of a postcard, and it's too bad that the medium is slowly dying out. But it's not fair to accuse the kids of being lazy just because they don't feel like going through all the hassle involved in writing, stamping, and mailing an actual printed postcard. The postcard may be dying, but as the Everywhere community has already demonstrated, the commitment to documenting and sharing the travel experience is alive and well.