This morning I woke up to an email from the California Wine Club, with what I found to be an interesting note. Apparently they’re having trouble getting enough paper to print their normal end of year sale booklets.
Ok, color be skeptical.
First, I haven’t seen any paper shortages elsewhere in places where they’d presumably have larger paper needs, but also have even less cash to spend. Specifically here, I’m talking about public schools like where my wife works or where my kids attend.
To think this through, why might California Wine Club not want to be sending those beautiful booklets any longer? To start, some background the original founders of California Wine Club also owned a printing company, so they had a very real advantage in being able to produce these marketing pieces more cheaply than everybody else. But, they don’t own the wine club any longer. I assume the current owners don’t have those same advantages.
Producing those booklets are expensive. Heck, I attempted to move my wine club customers to digital copies of my newsletter at various points, with at least 2 well planned out attempts. You know what I found? People really, really wanted those paper copies. For a while I thought it was because my average age was like Boomers, but even as it started to skew younger over time, they still wanted those paper copies.
So, do I think California Wine Club really can’t get paper? Not really. Do I think they’d like to move everyone to digital copies? Heck yes. Do I think they’ll be as successful in doing so as they’d hope? Not a chance.