The words 'wish you were here' and scenes like the one in our photo are on the decline as the postcard industry struggles to compete with new technology and social media. The rise and rise of the smartphone has played a large part in the fall and fall of the postcard with only one in six Brits sending a postcard home from their holidays.
A survey of 2000 adults revealed that 45% of people have never sent a postcard while on holiday and 46% use text, Facebook, Twitter and email while abroad and not surprisingly these percentages increase markedly when restricted to the under 24 age group!
Other factors contributing to the demise of the postcard are the slowness of delivery – remember when your postcards all arrived about a week after you did? - and the difficulty in finding stamps and postboxes. For 10% of us, there's also a worry that what happens in Ibiza won't stay in Ibiza once the postman gets to read all about it on your postcard to your mum!
There's already a market – just look at Ebay – for old cards, and back in the good old days of tourism a monochrome shot of one of the natives hanging out the washing or a collage of scenes from the island was considered perfectly fine to send home.
Quite what connection kittens and puppies in shades and scurrilous poses have with Ibiza, I've no idea. Ditto the gigantically obese woman who must have died many years ago from her condition, whose vast naked folds of flesh have adorned every postcard display since the 80's though, typically, I couldn't find it today when I actually needed it, so make do with the toned torsos below.
