Yeah it’s a hack joke (first part at least) but why did wallets originally have fake family photos in them when you bought them, but now when you buy a wallet it’s completely empty?
So yes two part question.
Just a guess, but perhaps when photo sleeves were added to wallets, the fakes were inserted to make it clear what the sleeves were for? And now everyone keeps photos on their phones, so nobody cares?
Best guess…
I once bought a pretty 5x7 frame because of the picture in the frame. I had it hanging for years, and even created a backstory about the woman pictured.
Maybe at first, they thought of it as akin to staging a house for sale, with the idea that it looks more appealing if it’s not empty. Then, maybe, general sentiment came to a consensus that it seemed pointless to go to the expense of including pictures of people who’ll be complete strangers to the eventual buyer.
Maybe.
The first part makes perfect sense. And it was easy back in the old days when only straight white men bought wallets.
The wallet manufacturer divorced and is not on speaking terms with his sons…
It cost money to add a picture and placed in a sleeve, it was cost reðuced out by the bean counters.
If someone wanted to “stage” a wallet, maybe they should put a (fake) $5 bill in the main part. The part which embodied the actual function: carrying money.
And they could stop because modern wallets rarely carry cash, thanks to the same digital trends as photographs . Your money is 1s and 0s in a server someplace, accessed by a piece of plastic or on your phone.
Do wallets even have photo sleeves anymore? Mine doesn’t.
How did you get that interesting character as the “d”?
It’s an eth, you can copy and paste it from Wikipedia or typology cheatsheets, you can type Alt+(0240) (lowercase) or Alt+(0208) (uppercase)…
I used to see them with fake credit cards in those sleeves as well (and, as a kid, thought it was cool to nab those to play with). So I assume the photo and cards were to inform the purchaser of what the sleeves could be used for and make the wallet feel more ‘personal’.
I miss the good old wallet days, when I could show off photos of the pretend family, which looked so normal compared to my own. 
Rodney Dangerfield said that his father left the fake photos in his wallet.
I would guess it’s two-part.
One part is customers wanting reduced packaging because there’s less waste, and it’s really a lot of paper if you think how many wallets are sold every year. When companies do tally sheets of materials used other than in direct manufacturing, they can say they’ve eliminated n reams of paper.
The other is what someone mentioned about straight white men. As more and more non-white, other-than-straight, other-than-male, and unmarried people start demanding recognition, it becomes easier to make marketing less specific rather than try and create separate products for every group.
The latter notwithstanding, I love my Nancy Drew wallet, that comes in leather and canvas versions, and the canvas (advertised as “vegan”) one cost more, but I paid it.
I worked with somebody who had several framed pictures on her desk, one of which she claimed was her boyfriend.
Then one of our coworkers saw all the same pictures/frames at a store. Hobby Lobby, if I recall.
She was a weird duck. Eventually was escorted out of the building one day after being a little too nutters.
I can assure you that it wasn’t on porpoise.
Didn’t Mr Bean pretend the “fake” photos were his family or friends?
Famously, in 1938 many department stores sold a particular brand of wallet with a fake Social Security card in it. The fakes were all identical. They had the name and number of the secretary of the President of the wallet manufacturer. Tens of thousands of people used that number over the years, some of them into the late 1970s.
I was thinking this way. This particular form of product promotion has been evolving into a way of offending potential customers more than anything else.