While buying a Mother’s Day card for my Grandmother I realized that Greeting Cards are the biggest, most clown-footed ass rape in the history of consumer goods.

I paid $2.69 for a poem written on cardstock with some graphics on it. They throw in an envelope for good measure too.  The text in the card is about 26 words. That’s about 10 cents per word if you assume that you’re paying for intellectual property. Let’s knock that down to 4 cents per word on the grounds that the artwork on a greeting card is a big part of what sells the card.

Now, the novel I’m reading is about 320 pages long. I estimate it to contain about 80,000 words. If the greeting card people were selling novels then we could expect the one I’m reading to cost about $3,200 bucks.

I only consider greeting cards an option when I can’t physically be present on a special event, other than birthdays. I never send them for birthdays because I’m too lazy and, besides, mature adults shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about their birthday anyway.