With layoffs continuing across the country and the national unemployment rate hovering over 9 percent, Hallmark has designed a line of unique sympathy cards to help well-wishers commiserate with the recently pink-slipped, according to a CNN report.
The idea was sparked by customers who began asking the company for a card to address the hardship many Americans are now facing.
“Getting a card like that and somebody caring is fabulous,” Michelle Crowthers-Lunczynski of Work One in Franklin, Ind., told CNN affiliate WTHR in Indianapolis, Indiana. “The crazy part to think about this is there’s so many people laid off. At least someone’s caring enough to, you know, get a card and say, ‘I’m thinking of you.’”
The job-loss cards are not available in all 40,000 Hallmark retail locations, but they can be purchased on the company’s website.
The cards themselves feature messages ranging from the sentimental to the snarky. One reads: “Don’t think of it as losing your job. Think of it as a time-out between stupid bosses.”
“The ones that offer more moral support, but maybe with a little humorous twist in a more encouraging fashion are doing very well and we’re publishing more of those,” Hallmark’s creative director Derek McCracken told NPR’s All Things Considered.
Hallmark has a history of marketing to trends and current events. It has produced cards for Americans affected by events such as the Great Depression, the Vietnam military draft and the 9/11 terror attacks.