It's only a little while ago that we started noticing ourselves saying " Yes! We stock the big size frames!" more and more often to our Customers' calls, and so, here's this post! Now, we've always stocked " big
sizes" frames, for years, actually, but how come we're being asked this more frequently? Our theory is that is due mainly to two, important, factors. The first is that there are less and less of these variety stores and discount shops around. Many have simply stopped trading and closed down because their small business proprietors can't make enough money to pay expensive rents and high taxes, let alone paying themselves even a basic wage. The first factor is the easiest to ... adduce and it goes like this; so as to curry electoral gratitude and voting rewards from electorates, successive quasi-socialist, Federal and Statal governments have been financially oppressing all investors, and especially landlords.
One could go so far as to say that these governments have been, more or less, "buying" their votes and their elections from the poor by seducing with alluring promises such as: "Vote for us! We will tax the rich a lot more than you and tax you a lot less than them".
Naturally enough this worked, hence the ongoing and growing fiscal oppression and financial persecution of private landlords by the left-leaning, socialist, labor governments.
Investors have reacted to this perfidious re-distribution of wealth by fiscal stealth by selling and abandoning real estate investments, especially residential ones, in droves. Many of them have shifted their investments to commercial properties. The resulting, concomitantly greater investor demand has led to higher valuations of commercial buildings such as stores and shops.
And since higher valuations encourage and contribute to the generation of higher returns, rents have increased, becoming more and more expensive for tenants. A more expensive rent means that many of the smaller tenants, such as the $2 or $2+ stores, have chosen to stock mostly small, and and fast-moving products, such as everyday household items, disposables and consumables.
Big, fragile, unwieldy, and cumbersome glass picture frames aren't exactly fast moving, hot-sellers and this is why many stores have either discontinued them or have stopped selling larger sizes frames altogether.
The second factor has more to do with modern shopping trends and COVID after effects. To put it in a nutshell, more and more people are choosing to buy unexciting, everyday, discount chattels, such as picture frames, online. If they do decide to drive down to the shops, it will be to buy clothes, hire services, or have lunch, rather than to buy humdrum goods. And several years of collective COVID house arrest greatly strengthened and reinforced what had already been a growing trend.
More and more Customers realised that, basically, you can buy and get delivered to your door anything nowadays. They have tasted thee cheapness and convenience of doing their shopping with mouse clicks and they're not going back to the drudgery of having to drive to a physical store, especially if it's only to get cheap, throwaway, homewares such as photo frames or picture frames.
So, if discount stores are no longer stocking big size frames, who does? Well, we do! By far our most popular, "big size frames" are the A0 size, this being 84.1 x 118.9 cm, with the A0 Raw Oak poster frame shown below:
Perhaps a close second, in popularity, is our 70 x 100 cm black wood poster frame with clear glass, with an example of which is pictured below:
And an equal second, or third, are our 18"x24" black wood poster frames with clear glass below:
Yet another "big size" frame which is rather popular is the 24"x36" wood poster frame in our range of three colours, black, white and natural finishes.
Many of our popular prints and posters on the market and online now are designed, printed in the United States and then exported here. A well-known picture frames and posters store from Texas, in the United States, Frame Destination, has summarized their most common sizes in the diagramme below.
Of the four sizes illustrated below, the only one which we found was not popular, is the 11"x17" which we stocked for a while, but eventually discontinued it a couple of years ago because of insufficient demand.
With regard to ordering the above, and other large frame frame sizes, it is important to note that these are unshippable, meaning that we cannot courier these, post these or freight them. All these frames need to be collected by Customers at our store.
The main reason for this is that most of them are glazed with glass and it is impossible the ship them safely ship to Customers' addresses. With regard to this issue, we are occasionally disappointed with some Customers.
It has happened several times in the past that a Customer would order, say, a large A0 white frame which we would then process, as instructed, as Customer Collect. After the order was completed the Customer would then contact us telling us ( not asking us ) to deliver the frame at such and such address, often adding that they understood that it would be a free delivery.
On these occasions, we have no option but to cancel the order and and refund, less any Credit card charges.
Again, with regard to big poster frames or large picture frames, there are a couple of other points worth bearing in mind when ordering them. The first is that it is always best to bring the artwork ( print, poster or photograph ) with you when collecting the frame, or frames.
That way we can help you check that you have ordered the right size frames, particularly if and when the art has been bought online. In our experience, about 1/3rd of all online print purchases brought to us are not the correct size, that is, they are either under or over the described, published or advertised size.
Often, Customers buy picture frames without doing this, take the picture frames home, find out that these don't fit the art and then have to return them.
Perhaps a last point, but one definitely worth mentioning, is how to transport home the large picture frames that Customers buy at our store. On that very topic we actually published the post: A0 Picture frames: Who, What, When, Where and Why which not only explains Customers what these large frame are but is also illustrated with photographs of the dos and don'ts of transporting them.