Why Did Walmart Stop Selling Index Cards?
They Betrayed Me
Does everyone remember the contents of their childhood junk drawer? For some reason, I can still picture so many of those random bits and bobs - the old Breyers Ice Cream wooden ruler, the nonfunctional purple chip-clip, the two LG Env2 cellphones kept “just in case” someone dropped their new phone in a lake. And always, in all different sizes and colors, index cards, filling out the empty space like packing peanuts. Maybe my experience was a little different with two teacher parents, but index cards just always existed, our stash never depleted and was seemingly always growing with new varieties. My preference leaned towards the ruled cards (I have never been able to write in a straight line without a guide), and I made many a 4x6 flashcard. I never got into the habit of using index cards as tools for writing, as some people do to piece together and rearrange ideas, but they were indispensable to my memorizing names and dates and definitions and spellings.
I now use index cards for an entirely different purpose. They are, and have been for some time, the main medium on which I print my photographs. I am sure I have written previously about why a 4x6 index card makes a great foundation for a print (especially a laser print), so I’ll just say here that they are sturdy, consistent, the perfect size, and until very recently, easily accessible. Realizing that 1,000 index cards cost the same as 25 sheets of fine art paper solidified the cards as my printing paper of choice. That is, until I couldn’t find them anywhere, for any price.
I sourced my index cards from Walmart from the beginning. It was an intentional choice, the thought being that any Walmart anywhere in the country would have the same index cards readily available. It sounded better than building my whole printing process around a paper that I could only get from one specialized supplier. The thought never crossed my mind that Walmart would, or even could, stop selling 4x6 index cards. Well, it figured that when I stopped in recently to buy a few hundred cards for an upcoming project, I was out of luck. Not only were there no 4x6 index cards in the store, there wasn’t even a spot for them on the shelf. Thinking a supply shortage might have impacted this specific Walmart, I checked the stock of a few others online. In growing disbelief I saw that 4x6 index cards were no longer offered in any Walmart, and were even absent from the online catalog of items. It seems the company as a whole decided to strike the 4x6 from their offerings completely, to my great dismay.
I will say that Walmart still sells 3x5 index cards, and my reaction may seem a bit exaggerated given this fact. But I have already built an extensive body of 4x6 work (not to mention that 4x6 is the smallest size my printer recognizes automatically). So downsizing was not worth the compromise – I had to look elsewhere. Amazon, I am sad to admit, was my next thought.
There are as many different options for 4x6 index cards on Amazon as you might think. They all appear about the same, at least in the pictures. How different could index cards be? The reviews, however, are scathing. Everyone seems to think index cards used to be thicker, brighter, sturdier, smoother, better printed, and that nothing currently offered on Amazon even comes close. “More like index pages given how thin these are. Crooked lines too!” one review reads, trying to sound more vitriolic than is really possible when you’re talking about office supplies. But recipe keepers, teachers, librarians, and students would all seem to agree that index cards today just aren’t the same. I ordered a pack of “Amazon’s best-seller” to see for myself and I have to say, the reviews are right. These cards were thin, almost grey in color, with inconsistent ruling and a texture that felt like used sandpaper. I made a few test prints, and a one-to-one comparison proved beyond a doubt that the new index cards were, in plain terms, shit. It seemed I was SOL.
I was in a position that I have since realized is almost inevitable in the life of an artist – needing to look elsewhere when materials become scarce or disappear altogether. When lead paint was banned across the board in the 1970s, painters had to relearn color mixing with the new titanium and zinc whites. Ask any photographer who was printing in the darkroom twenty years ago, and they’ll tell you that new silver gelatin paper doesn’t have nearly as high a silver content as it used to, leading to greyer blacks and rendering years’ worth of careful notes obsolete. Even color negative film, despite its decades of ubiquity and recent revival, is becoming increasingly expensive and hard to find, forcing the hard decision on new and old photographers alike whether to stick to analog or make the jump to digital. Even digital platforms and mediums become obsolete - when the social media platform Vine was taken down in 2017, thousands of talented video artists who had perfected the 6-second clip had to rethink their whole creative process. These issues affect artists at every level; many of the most well-known and highest-paid artists working today struggled with supply chain issues caused by the pandemic. Unless you are making your own pigments and paper from the dirt and plants in your backyard (which Taylor tells me can also change or disappear or go extinct), an artist has next to no control over outside factors interrupting their process.
We often look at art, especially smaller works like paintings or photographs, as the creations of inspired individuals. The truth is, even the simplest works are collaborations between countless people, industries, companies, and markets. We can see the artist as the individual who puts all the final pieces together, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that they are dependent on countless factors outside of their control. I’m not about to list Walmart as a collaborator on all of my index card prints, but I can’t deny that their products were essential in shaping that part of my practice, and now that they are gone I’ve really had to reassess how I work. What I make is directly linked to decisions of businesses and markets, and will be for as long as I use manufactured materials in my art.
It shouldn’t be surprising that thinking about this - art’s dependency on capitalist structures - has gotten me a bit down. But it is also interesting to think how this unavoidable link between art, material, and industry firmly grounds art in its own time and landscape. Being able to use or obtain a certain material, or not being able to, is maybe the clearest example of how art and artists reflect their cultural surroundings. The future will study the art we make now and make inferences based on what particular mediums we use, what was available and what was not, and through this our part of history will be better understood.
A big part of writing this post has been realizing there is more to my index card situation than despair. I can’t help but feel connected to artists, of the past and present, who have also had to find new ways of working as time moves certain materials out of reach. Not that I want to go around dropping they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-tos, but I can certainly better sympathize with artists grieving the loss of a very specific material. I have also begun imagining art as a long chain of evolving practices, not just of tastes and techniques, but of materials and technology. Going all the way back to charcoal and rust on cave walls, something always comes along to replace or disrupt the current way of doing things. Who knows where this might lead in the future, as even the mind-boggling technology we have for making art today is made obsolete and goes the way of lead paint.
So what conclusion did I come to in my own predicament? Well, it turns out that Target sources their 4x6 index cards from the same place as Walmart once sourced theirs. They are exactly the same in every way I can measure. So, I cleared Target out, and now my studio is packed almost as full of index cards as my childhood junk draw. Hopefully, my stash lasts until the next laser-printer paper revelation.
I’ve been printing a lot of my photos from the last few years on 4x6s at my little studio. Really cool to see what you’ve done with yours.