Spring is finally here. Which means lovely occasions such as Easter and Passover. Question is, when you are not with your loved ones do you send cards? Of course the greeting card industry would have you send cards for just about every occasion. And if so, is it an online card or an actually, physical card?

Is an ecard as thoughtful as actually purchasing a card, writing a little ditty, placing a stamp and mailing the card? Of course not, but to quote a teenager who looked at me as though I was mad: “there is going to come a time when no-one actually sends cards – they are all going to be online”.

I guess greeting cards are going the way of newspapers.

There are cards for everything, not just holidays and the obligatory event cards such as Valentine’s Day. Now you can send cards for adoption, divorce, even commiseration for the stock market crisis. I assume there is one that sends condolences to the victims of Bernie Madoff. In fact if you go online to one the top egreeting sites, you will see that there are thousands of card-sending occasions – it is a full time job just keeping up with all those events to match the appropriate message to your friends.

It’s actually big business. The greeting card industry is over $7billion and they are expanding to online precisely because our culture is moving to online greetings. And as a result they can economically produce multiple situations for which consumers can send a card.

So Happy April 1 – I am sure many of us are going to receive April Fools’ Day e-greeting cards.