Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  Not too long ago the president of Printing Industries of America, PIA, wrote a letter to the president saying that he was out of line for saying that the Federal Register was a doorstop and did not need to be printed.  Well the Federal Register does not need to be printed.  There are a lot of things that don’t need to be printed anymore because we search through them through databases.  They are much more efficient.  Congressional Record is one of the last things they print, but even that is available in electronic form and that is how it’s used in many cases.  

So the world is changing and we have to understand the printed products that will exist into the future because some of the printed products that exist now are going away and that is just the way it is.  So if you’re going to write a letter to the president maybe you should write a letter to all the companies out there that—and organizations and government facilities that are starting to make these changes because they are looking for other ways to disseminate information.  Our challenge in the printing industry is to find those products that will continue into the future and emphasize them and build on them, especially new products that are being developed.

For instance, coupons, I mean coupons are a gigantic printed business.  September is National Coupon Month.  I didn’t know that.  I didn’t know there was a month for coupons, but what is interesting here is that most of the coupons today are going electronic.  You’re starting to see people go online finding coupons and printing them out themselves.  Now coupons save people money.  It says here for every hour spent couponing it’s worth an estimated $100 and the average savings per coupon is $1.44.  So coupons are a big business, but now more and more people are starting to use them, starting to get them electronically, print them out themselves.  By the way, I think we should get a credit for printing them out ourselves.

I bought an Apple product.  I buy a lot of Apple products.  They don’t give me a printed receipt.  I can get one if I want it, but they send it to me electronically as PDF, so it says here retailers ditch paper and pen, use email for receipts.  Now you would think that is not a big market, those receipts that come out.  It’s just plain paper through a thermal printer of some sort.  Well it’s printing and so as retailers now do electronic receipts it’s less and less paper for the printed receipt as you would imagine.  That is a change.  

Ordinances could cut yellow page publishers’ revenues by half a million, 500 million dollars.  I'll get that right, 500 million, half a billion dollars.  Certain cities especially starting with San Francisco are urging and mandating an opt-in or opt-out on yellow pages, so you can say I don’t want to receive the yellow pages.  Well that immediately cuts the number of yellow pages editions that are distributed, which cuts the value of the advertising that is in it, which means then that you won’t have as many yellow pages out there.  There is a lot of competition in the yellow pages business, not only from the phone companies, but also from the Yellow Book and other private publishers.  They say it’s part of going green, that some people don’t need a yellow pages.  They are using the internet in order to find information.

And lastly, this is the one that gets me because I would have thought that if all printing ever disappeared there would be one level of printing that would still be there.  The Federal government would still have to print money.  As plastic reigns the Treasury slows its printing presses.  As we use plastic more they don’t have to print as many.  Production of $5 bills has dropped to the lowest level in 30 years.  For the first time in the period that they’re tracking here the Treasury Department did not print any new $10 bills, so the future is here.  Cash is in decline except for the guy that robbed $45,000 in cash from the printing business in New Jersey.  There are places where it says credit cards only, no cash.  However, when I go to the gas station there is a discount in some gas stations for cash and I pay more if I use my credit card, which is not fair either.  

So what we’re seeing then is that the world is changing in terms of print and we have to keep up with it and understand it and deal with it and stop writing nasty letters that aren’t going to do anything.  Thank you very much because that is my opinion.