Why the name card refuses to die

The name card refuses to die because it's cheaper to keep ordering than to hold a meeting about stopping. It also does one small thing a phone can't: it asks nothing of the person across the table.

I can't prove the first part with a survey. I couldn't find anyone in Malaysia or Singapore who counts boxes, so this is sums on one public price list, plus some opinion.

What a box really costs

A box is a hundred cards. On the name card printing page at Kiasu Printing in Singapore, one box of digital cards, printed on one side, is 24 Singapore dollars.

Five boxes of matt laminated offset cards are thirty there, which works out at six dollars a box, and two boxes are twenty-two. The offset ones take about a week instead of three or four working days, so part of what you're paying with is time.

What one box costs on that Singapore list, in Singapore dollars

So on the boxes I've named, one card costs between six cents and about a quarter of a dollar. Say you hand out two a week. One box lasts about a year, and the whole habit costs you under fifty cents a week.

Too small to argue about

Here's my theory of why it lasts. Nobody puts a box of cards on a meeting agenda, because the sum is too small to deserve one.

Moving an office to digital cards is a project, by comparison. As far as I can tell, someone has to choose a product, pay for it, and chase colleagues to set it up. Ordering a box is one email.

The card hasn't escaped untouched. Some Malaysian printers told researchers that stationery orders, business cards included, were well down in the pandemic, which came up in how print shops got through it. I couldn't find a number for how far they've recovered.

You'll also see it said that almost nine in ten cards get binned within a week. I couldn't find the study behind that. The pages repeating it credit different companies, or nobody, and plenty of them sell digital cards.

But say it's true. At a quarter of a dollar a card, each one that survives cost about two dollars, and that's still cheap for being remembered.

How anyone earns on this

Part of it is the long run, which that price list gives away. My reading is that the first boxes carry the cost of getting started, and after that each extra box costs very little.

The other part is company on the sheet. A printing consultant's blog post explains it: one business card job printed alone might cost $200 or more.¹ Put it on press with many other clients' work, so everyone splits the prepress, press work and finishing, and it might cost $10 or $20.¹

That's an old post and I'm reading those as US dollars, though the logic is what I'm after. I suspect it's also part of why the slow offset boxes on that Singapore list are the cheap ones, but the page doesn't say so.

Then there's scale. A listed online printing group's annual report says a typical order of 250 standard cards takes under 14 seconds of labour in its Europe and North America operations, against an hour or more at a traditional printer.² It calls business cards "a mature but strongly profitable product".²

The same report says that took almost two decades and massive volume. So don't picture a two-person shop in Klang doing it.

The last part is my guess: the reorder. A card goes out of date all at once. A new title, a new number or a new office makes the whole box wrong, usually with most of it left, and by then the printer already has your file.

Nobody gets three quotes on a reprint that small, I'd imagine. I couldn't find a printer publishing how much of its card money comes from reorders, so that's only my reasoning.

What a QR code can't do

A QR code is a small request: open your camera, trust this square, wait for it to load. A card just sits there being a card, and it'll still be on the desk next week.

That request has got harder to say yes to. The Star reported that Malaysian police recorded QR code scam cases rising from 223 to 5,907 in two years, and the commercial crime director asked people to be careful before scanning.³

The codes he described come from strangers, or with urgent requests for money, not from a colleague at a seminar. I'm not saying yours is dangerous. It's just an awkward moment to ask someone to scan a square so they can get to know you.

Then there's the ceremony. A guide to Malaysian business culture has rules for receiving one:⁴

• use both hands, or the right hand only
• look at it carefully before you put it down
• keep it out of your back pocket, which "could be taken as you sitting on the individual's face"⁴

It's from 2016 and written for outsiders, so I'd hold it loosely.⁴ But I can't imagine anyone writing that about a QR code.

The QR people are right about one thing. Their version can be corrected, and a card can't. That's the card's one real flaw, and I suspect it's also a fair slice of the printer's living.