According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, there has been a noticeable decline in family card games, which can be attributed to, in part, advancing technology. This isn’t all that surprising, but many benefits are being lost, the report underscored.
“A whole generation of consumers didn’t learn to play cards the way an entire prior generation did,” P.J. Katien, vice president, sales and marketing, for the U.S. Playing Card Co., owner of the Bicycle, Bee, Kem and Hoyle brands, told the WSJ.
However, a renewed interest in card games might be on the horizon, as sales of traditional playing cards have actually increased 1-2 percent industry-wide over the past two years, according to Katien. People may be falling in love again with the classic games.
That should be some welcome news for poker lovers, as many in the poker community, long before they discovered it in a home game with friends or on the Internet, first dabbled in card-playing (usually not for money yet) with family at an early, impressionable age.
Perhaps a deeper reason for the decline in card games in the home is because of a decrease in leisure time and/or a change in leisure time preferences linked to U.S. economic changes, a theory put forth in an scholarly article from the University of Illinois. The research was focused primarily on contract bridge, widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated of the traditional card games. The essay did reiterate the argument that younger generations increasingly have more to choose from entertainment-wise than the generation that preceded them.
