Everything old, is new again...Sears

[SoCalDem]

I watched an ad last night for Sears.. their "NEW" feature?

You go online, pick out what you want, click on it, "buy" it, and then you go to your nearest Sears store, and pick it up...


Oh my.. just a few years ago they did away with CATALOG sales because people "didn't want to shop that way anymore "

:rofl:

The "new" part is that it will only take "5 minutes" to pick up your package at the store..

Who wants to see that bridge I have for sale??

[Bluebear]

1. Ah the good old days

[lectrobyte]

5. That brings back some memories. The local hardware, the 5 & 10,

and the Sears catalog store. That was the shopping in my little town.

[mtnester]

7. Do you REMEMBER the childhood orgasms over the Sears Xmas catalog?

The fights with the brother and sister over who gets to look at it first? The turned down pages, the circled product.

DEFINITELY porn for kids.

[Ilsa]

10. Oooooh yeah! And 1968 was just about right for me.

I loved looking at the toys! Fortunately, my older sisters had pretty much given up on catalog shopping.

[Berry Cool]

20. Oh yes! This hits the spot for me, too.

Every year when my mother would get the new copy of the Christmas Wish Book, she'd gather my younger sister and me around her on the couch and we'd go through the back section with the toys in it, page by page, each one full of new things for us to want. It's still one of my fondest childhood memories.

[terip64]

9. Ahh, the infamous 1975 Sears catalog

Remember the man's penis was shown hanging out of his boxers?

That was a hit. We had that baby circled a hundred times! Too funny!


http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/sears.asp

God that picture brings back memories!

[mtnester]

17. Here is that infamous picture...you decide

[TahitiNut]

21. He dresses left, I see.

:rofl:

[mtnester]

22. Hah...yeppers that IS a penis by God

not a stupid mark...it's a PEEKER!

[HereSince1628]

23. Anatomically speaking, isn't that right?

Though it could be a mirror image.

[TahitiNut]

24. Ask a tailor. I've never been interested enough to pay any attention.

:shrug: I only repeat what I've been asked by my tailors when having trousers fitted. I assumed it was personal preference.

If such a catalog were to be given to me and 1,000,000 others, I'd be one of the very last to take any notice of the photo other than if I wanted those boxer shorts. :dunce:

Now ... if we want to pore over the lingerie models, that might be something I recall doing plenty of when I was a pre-teen. Plenty. Ubetcha. :evilgrin:

[Viva_La_Revolution]

33. I heard 80% of men dress to the left... coincidently about the same percentage

are right-handed. hmmmmm.

[TahitiNut]

34. (grin) That's one of the things I admire about you, VLR.

A kind of healthy(?) 'prurient interest' that mirrors mine ... and I'll never stop being curious, even if my libido vanishes with my teeth and good eyesight. As a kid, I'd have no interest in querying the tailor, but I'd probably get splinters peeking through some peephole into the girls' fitting room. It's also one of the things I enjoyed about my good friend Cheri (an 'out' lesbian) - she shared my viewpoint. :evilgrin:

:rofl:

[hsher]

28. See the 1971 Sears Catalog HERE

It's a Gen X time machine. Be sure to check ALL the links to the left. Trust me, you don't want to miss even one.

http://www.aperfectworld.org/sears.htm

[hsher]

29. Sample pic

http://www.aperfectworld.org/page_ten.htm

[yorkiemommie1]

32. that brought a

:) to my face.

[Catherine Vincent]

2. I just did that.

I purchased a new gas range. So far so good.

[pitohui]

3. that isn't real new either

i thought they'd been doing it for years but since i don't shop sears, who knows

office depot certainly has been doing it for years, i am sitting in a chair purchased that way from office depot that i bought before 911!

it can save you a bundle on shipping charges for large items

[atreides1]

4. It worked when I used it

Now granted that it took 7 minutes for my package, but that was because they had to get the video recorder carry bag from the electronics department!

[LibertyLover]

6. We bought a portable generator from Sears

last year that way. It did take longer than 5 minutes to pick up however because there were a couple of people ahead of me.

[SoCalDem]

15. Remember "Best" ?

Filling out all those little slips of paper while you shopped, and then going to collect all your newly-found treasures as you left the store :)

[LibertyLover]

25. Oh yeah - My first ever job was at a place called Service Merchandise

People would come in, look at stuff on display or in the catalog, fill in a form with the item number and hand the form to the counter staff. The counter staff would check it against the stat sheets for items we knew were back ordered or out of stock, and then hand it to the pickers, who would pull the items and hand the merchandise back to the counter staff to give to the customers. If an item was out of stock, there was usually a suggested alternate, always slightly more expensive, that you could offer to the customer - "I'm very sorry Mrs. Smith, but the two slice timer toaster you requested is not currently in stock. But I can offer you the 4 slice version for only $10 more." Usually the customers took the alternate - not always, but usually.

[Bonobo]

8. Reminds me of MNBA's "survey" yesterday...

They called me and informed me, without a pause to even see if I was interested, that since I was a valued customer, I could take part in their phone-survey, oh and by the way the phone call will be monitored for quality purposes...

So when I finally had a chance to speak, I told them that if they wanted to do market research , they could bloody well pay for it out of all the money they've nickled and dimed from "allowing" us to use machines instead of tellers and from service fees, interest fees, etc.

Imagine these jerks wanting me to spend my time doing a survey for their market research...

Anyone remember after they first introduced ATMs, the banks still were appreciative for a while that customers would "free up" tellers for other chores. There was no fee for the use of the machines then and we had no idea they would start firing tellers...

[acmejack]

12. You sound pretty unappreciative of the conveniences of modern technology

Seriously I agree! The worst thing was how the big gluttonous impersonal chain banks absorbed all the little friendly local banks. Everywhere I went, either Nations Bank or Bank of America would take over the bank and either close it or fire 80% of the staff. This pattern went on coast to coast over four decades. They bought the banks I did business with in five different States at various points of my life! I finally just gave up!

[Sal Minella]

18. The small town banks have been much on my mind.

When I was in school, we were taught that money in a savings account at the bank would earn six percent interest, but if we borrowed money we could expect to pay 12 percent interest. That's the way the banks worked in the fifties-sixties.

So now that your savings earn one percent, and your credit card interest is 25%, where is all that money in between going? To the big chain banks, obviously.

The bankers in the small towns managed to build some really elegant homes in the old days on that six percent differential between paying savers six percent and charging borrowers 12.

[Bonobo]

27. Remember bank books! With those proudly punched out holes!!

BTW, it's still that way in Japan. You have to present your bank book (inexplicably) and it gets punched (or that's the way it was 10 years ago anyway...)

[Bonobo]

26. You know I can't even look up the phone number of Bank of America...

in my friggin' phonebook. It's all the same 1-800 number for every goddamn Bank of America branch in the county/country(?)!

Fucking 'call centers' or whatever they call them... probably not even humans...

[napi21]

11. There's another BIG reason they did away with the catalog.

It's called MONEY! You have no idea how expensive those catalogs are to produce! Ican't even guess on the cost of the big Sears one, but I worked for a vitamin mfg. who had a relatively small color catalog. I believe we had around 50 pages and the book was around 6x8 inches. Our cost was $3.38 each and that didn't include the cost of the photo shoots, layout work and plates.

I would gladly accept the online catalog and it's ease of changing info, adding new items, etc. over that old paper thing anyday!

[Skidmore]

13. Sorry, but that's not catalog shopping. To catalog shop, the

merchandise is delivered to your home.

[SoCalDem]

14. You have that option as well..

When I used to catalog shop, I always picked it up at the store (when they could find it in the back)..:eyes:

That way if they sent the wrong thing, I was already there, and did not have to make another trip or mail it back.

our sears catalog section had tables & chairs for just that purpose..

the BEST ever..was when they opened up a catalog/outlet store about 5 miles from my house.. We got some FANTASTIC bargains there:)

[AllegroRondo]

16. the handy part - it can be picked up at any store

My mom did something like this a couple years ago. She got me a small fridge for Christmas, but rather than ship it she just ordered it on line and I went to the local Leowes to pick it up.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

19. Still buy all my Lee jeans at Sears

[Mr_Spock]

30. This is great for large items not normally stocked

I am going to buy a workbench & have it shipped to the local store so I can pick it up. 'Bout time!

[SmokingJacket]

31. I remember a weird store when I was a kid that did just that.

There was a showroom you could visit, and a catalog for stuff not on display, and you'd pick stuff out and they'd send a guy into the back room to pick it up. It was mostly boring or ugly stuff, if I remember right.

There was something distinctly unsatisfying about it.