mbanu wrote: ↑Mon Feb 21, 2022 7:57 am
By 1953, the practice was apparently considered mainstream enough to be used to advertise unrelated things, such as Parker "51" fountain pens.
I think this might have been around the start of a decline in interest, however, simply due to the fact that as the 1950s progressed, the sort of tea that the average American would encounter would always have been in a teabag, unless they specifically made the effort to search for loose-leaf tea.
By 1972, Elinor Horowitz remarked on this in a book on general fortune-telling, "Americans today have become so accustomed to the use of tea bags — and the idea that tea leaves must at any cost be kept out of the cup — that tea leaf reading is not nearly so popular as it used to be." By then, it was known as an English pastime, although I'm not sure that was really true. In 1971, 51% of the tea sold in America was in teabags and 38% was instant tea, with only 11% loose. In 1950, loose tea had a 59% share of the U.S. tea market.
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One possible reason for the England connection (other than the general availability of loose-leaf over there in the 1970s), is that English stoneware manufacturers were selling Zodiac gift-set teaware in the U.S., like the Taltos Fortune-Telling Teacup, to try to take advantage of the general popularity of astrology in America during the late 1960s/early 1970s.
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I imagine that this would have been the sort of situation that lead to the Bigelow re-branding.
Trying to maintain their existing drinkers from the early 60s who were looking for a tea to accompany their home-cooked American-Chinese food, while also attracting young people looking for a loose-leaf tea to perform teacup reading.
Although Bigelow kept the name, for most of the 1980s any references to "reading the tea leaves" were metaphorical. Even though an interest in loose-leaf was starting to develop again in the U.S. due to folks like James Norwood Pratt and his circle, in 1989 63% of the tea sold in America was in teabags and 34% was instant tea, with only 3% loose, while many of the original holdouts like the UK had switched over to teabags as well. (The Zodiac fad had fizzled out by then.)
A few such places are still around today, such as the Tremont Tearoom in Boston, but I don't think these places are big influencers anymore -- in the past, tea companies would sometimes publish booklets on how to read tea-leaves in hopes of selling more tea, certainly not something they do anymore.