Carton Card and Papyrus announce store closings
A long-time staple of shopping malls will soon be gone. With fewer and fewer people buying greeting cards, the card and stationery retailers Carlton Cards and Papyrus announced in late January that they’ll be closing all 254 of their outlets in North America, including 79 stores in Canada.
“Despite our Herculean efforts to realign our Papyrus and American Greetings stores to fit today’s shopping environment, Schurman Retail Group had to make the difficult decision to close all 254 of our stores in North America,” the company that owns the stores said in a statement.
The closures will affect about 1,400 employees.
Most of the stores will remain open through February and into March as they use clearance sales to get rid of stock. Schurman Retail Group will continue to sell its greeting cards in Canada through Shopper’s Drug Mart/Pharmaprix, London Drugs, and Indigo book stores.
Retailers have been cutting down on the amount of shelving they allocate to greeting cards. In the United States in 2019, CVS Pharmacies and Walmart said they would be cutting back on the amount of shelving allocated to greeting cards, according to Business Insider, and according to the data firm CoStar Group, about 27% of American retail space for selling cards was lost between 2013 and 2018.
Photo: iStock/Cineberg.