As a little kid from a poor family, getting the Sears Catalog was like getting to window shop in places we would rarely get to visit. I am old school, don’t like e-books, or catalogs on line. Just not the same as perusing and slowly turning those pages.

My grandfather was a rural mail carrier. When he started he delivered mail on horseback. He said that he dreaded the arrival of the Sears catalogs. He needed to deliver bags of catalogs as quickly as possible because everybody wanted their catalogs NOW. If a family got their catalog a day or two after their neighbor, there would be hell to pay.

My stepdad worked for Sears as the manager of shipping and receiving for 40 plus years. Growing up in the 1970’s, there were my 2 brothers and 3 step siblings, along with my mom and stepdad all under one roof. Every fall, my siblings and I waited with anticipation for a copy of the latest Sears Christmas catalog that my stepdad would bring home. We usually always got ours before any of our friends and neighbors. We had so much fun flipping through those pages and dreaming of what we all wanted for Christmas.🤗🥰
During my college years, in the early 80’s, my stepdad helped get me a job in the Sears credit department, located in Jackson, Ms. I worked summers, Christmas break and Spring break throughout most of my college years. Eventually, the credit department was closed in Jackson and relocated to the Sears Tower in Chicago, IL when they added the Discover credit card. I enjoyed working there and made enough money to cover the cost of my books at Mississippi State University every year, and to buy a few new outfits for the coming Fall Semester.🥰

I'm an old guy now, and I have good memories of the Sears catalog. Hours of perusing the pages filling out one of the order forms as IF I could buy the bike, rifle, or tools I had chosen from the offerings. Thank you for this jog down memory lane.

The Sears Christmas Book came out in Oct or so. By the time December 24th rolled around, I had memorized everything I wanted. The pages were worn out from all of us taking turns with it. But on Christmas Day, I was lucky to get ONE of the many items on my wish list. :)

I live in Canada. My friend and l loved our Sears catalogues.  She and her husband would come over every Saturday. The men would go off and talk about their ham radios while my friend and l sat at the dining room table and we would leaf through the pages of our catalogues with ohs and ahs. We would buy bedspreads and Christmas gifts from the Christmas Wish catalogue.  Now, in Canada, Sears is NO MORE And my friend died in 2020..

My childhood was about ordering from the catalog and waiting for the mail to deliver. Sears was how I learned about life in America.

Those were the days BEFORE planned obsolescence!  You received fantastic warranties—including lifetime for some tools!! 😄

Thanks for getting this up here. How tragic and truly stupid is the demise of Sears? They did away with their famous catalogs just at the dawn of the Internet as we know it in 1993. With well over a century of experience in mail order marketing and fulfillment they really COULD have become what Amazon is today, but really blew it. Once a central mainstay of American life, I doubt many in the generation coming up now may even recognize the brand.

Sears was my Dad’s favorite store. He could get everything and anything. I remember one time my Dad ordered a .38 stub nose pistol from Sears catalog. It was the only gun my Dad ever had. The .38 pistol came in the US mail, along with extra bullets. Sears was the 1st Walmart, but much better. Oh the great memories….

I was born in ‘65, up through middle school the sears catalog was pure christmas magic. All year we shopped from it. I think the last thing l got from it was a cute easter dress set when l was around 15. Then l got too fancy for sears anymore😂 such a sweet memory of life in america.

When I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, the Sears catalog was still a big deal.

Loved that thing.

I grew up in the,70s , my sister and I couldn't wait for that catalog ! We spent hours going through it! Good times!!

In 1968 I became Director of Marketing for one of the many companies that made things for Sears, mostly for camping and fishing. We often made the same article, perhaps in a different color and always in different packaging, to Montgomery Ward, The Boy Scouts, Girl Scout, the green stamp catalogs and various specialty catalog companies like Butlers and Western Auto. Sears represented about 50% of our sales.  

On my very first visit to the Sears buyer who bought a huge quantity of stuff from us, he encouraged me to ask whatever I was curious about how they did business. Until then, all my experience had been in industrial and technical sales. Mass Merchandise was totally new to me.

Feeling comfortable with his openness, I asked him about the stories I'd often heard that said if you allowed Sears to become your major customer (which they were), they would squeeze out all your profit and then take you over. I also heard that they would cut you off in favor a new supplier if the new guy beat your price by a few cents because that added up to tens of thousands of dollars across the hundreds of thousands they bought.

His answer was a mantra I've always respected, "A dependable supplier is just as important as a dependable customer."

He explained, "I'm responsible for about 200 items. Many of them, like yours (air mattresses, rain jackets, fisherman's waders, etc) are seasonal. I need my sleep at night. The last thing I need is to be worrying if you are going to distribute our orders on time, in the quality promised, in the quantity needed at each store or warehouse to match the marketing plan we've spent a big effort planning for that category in this season. I want you to be profitable so you can keep your promises. I want you to be prosperous and able to afford innovation and experimentation to develop new products."

Although our company never needed financial support, I later learned that Sears would sometimes finance a suppliers raw materials and even advance low-rate loans to upgrade production facilities for goods that Sears wanted. They considered their suppliers as partners. They treated them as such.

I also learned the meaning and application of the sign over the door at most Sears stores that promised "Satisfaction Guaranteed or your Money Back."

As a supplier, we made shipments every month - sometimes every week - and submitted the supporting documents, along with an invoice. The bills were paid promptly and along with that check we received a detailed report listing every single item that had been returned by a customer. Full value of that item was deducted from our remittance. That cost, after stats were developed by experience, was factored into our pricing.  

Our goods were never actually defective. Be Sears and we in turn, recognized the goods were, in the perception of an occasional customer, not satisfactory. We were always happy to back up the Sears promise. It was smart business.

It's not an accident that those same unquestioned return policies are common in today's online sales. They are so common that most people do not realize they were a marketing innovation. I live now in a location where there are many stores operated by immigrants who bring with them the old restrictive policies that are common in their original countries. Signs that say "all sales final" are common. Their first-generation immigrant clients expect that refusal. Therefore, they still buy.

But their children, American born and exposed to the internet, know better. So, as the first generation passes the old country based stores wither away.

The Christmas Wish book was a wonderful thing to all us kids back in 1960's and 70's. Also loved the JC Penny catalog. All gone now. A bygone age.

The Sears Wish Book at Christmas was a thing of Beauty for me as a Kid! I made my Santa's List from it.

My great grandparents grew up in rural Oklahoma, and they used to tell me when I was very young that every outhouse in the neighborhood had a copy of the Sears Catalog inside of it.

The Sear's & Roebuck catalog was our wish book for Christmas...
I'd spend hour after hour viewing the toys, boats, trains and such
trying to decide what I could get for what Mama said was my limit.

The first thing you did in my family when you went to visit grandma's house was to flip through the latest Sears catalog as everyone catches up!

I started as a mail carrier in 1988. I remember delivering a huge amount of catalogs.

As a child in the 50s  our house was a mail order house. It had been delivered to the previous owners by way of the Mississippi River. They had raised and sold turkeys, rabbits, chickens and anything else that would make money for them to pay for their house. Whole houses sold in the Sears catalog...amazing