Postcards from a bygone era

/ Alex Good

So I was looking to buy a postcard recently. My first stop was the Dollar Store, where you can usually pick up a lot of cheap cards. Alas, there was no rack for postcards. So I asked the woman working there, who I would have put in her early 30s, if they had any postcards. She looked at me blankly. I asked again and she shook her head, not saying anything, apparently in some confusion. Then she said that they sold envelopes for cards. I told her that postcards don’t go in envelopes. This seemed to confuse her even more and I don’t think she knew what I was talking about. But I chatted with her for a while anyway and left without thinking any more of it.

My next stop was a drug store that also has a post office desk in it. I asked the woman running the place (another thirty-something) if they had any postcards. She didn’t understand me so I repeated “Postcards?” I got another blank look. I honestly thought I wasn’t speaking clearly enough, as I do tend to mumble a bit. So I leaned in closer and said “Post. Cards.” She leaned back away from me (I can be a bit intimidating) with a look of nervous confusion on her face. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. I said “Postcards. They’re like pictures . . . that you mail.” She still looked at me with a total lack of understanding. She honestly had no idea what I was talking about.

I realize people don’t mail postcards that much anymore, but still this was a bit surprising. Two youngish people who didn’t have a clue what a postcard was? The times they are a-changing.

17 thoughts on “Postcards from a bygone era”

  1. WUT?!? The Dollar Store not having post cards!?!?
    I am outraged, so outraged. I am going straight to my facetubegramatok account and telling everyone how outrageous this is and that somebody needs to do something about the situation.

    I honestly don’t know where to buy postcards any more. Mrs B will buy them at little hole in the wall places when she travels, but that’s all I’m aware of now.

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    • I remember years ago when it came to discussions of privacy and email people used to say that you shouldn’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard. Meaning it was effectively there for anybody to read. Today I guess that analogy wouldn’t mean anything to a lot of people.

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      • It’s weird, though, because I’ve discovered that a TV show called Yellowjackets, the fourth and last season of which debuts this year, uses postcards as a plot device. It’s evidently a teenage Donner party thing and these postcards come to the adult survivors. So it’s not like postcards have been forgotten.

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      • It’s always hard to say how far something has gone based on anecdotal evidence (like what I experienced) or what we see represented in books and shows. It’s like the decline in reading, which is something that doesn’t show up very much in novels. This is why these people not knowing what a postcard was surprised me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known.

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  3. I told a child I work with to send a post card when he was sent out for misbehaving. He had absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about. 15 years old.

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      • I can attest to that because I work with the ones who can read 1000 words perfectly if it’s on a youtube or tik tok comment section, but can’t comprehend how many words are on a page of An Inspector Calls

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  5. This really made me ponder the last time I received a post card…or sent one…or even saw one. I remember both sending and receiving them back in the day, even fussing over which one was the best one to buy and mail. As I get older, I continue to be amazed at what younger folks aren’t even aware of relative to how in-play they were when I was their age.

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