Word: catalogs
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...plenty. All this stuff for sale, more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in even the maddest consumer's philosophy: buggy whips and barbering aids, covered wagons and canaries, tires and trousseaux, countless doodads that seemed unnecessary until they popped up on the page. From the Sears catalog, known affectionately as the "big book," customers could order everything necessary to equip a house: furniture, appliances, rugs, cooking and eating utensils and paint. Between 1908 and 1937, they could also order the house itself. All told, Sears sold 100,000 prefabricated models, and most of them are still standing...
...ranked low in user-friendliness. For most of its 97 years, the big book did not offer home-delivery service. People who wanted to purchase something listed could mail in their order but then had to journey to a place populous enough to sustain a Sears store or catalog center to pick it up. No use making a call. Only last year did 800-number operators start standing by, ready to take orders day and night; the big book, after all, was born when customers had no telephones. And such updated procedures, for all their added charms to the busy...
Sears' announcement last week that its 1993 catalog, all 1,556 pages of it, would be the last probably didn't mean much to couch potatoes cradling their Touch-Tone phones while watching the Home Shopping Network on cable. But for most people over a certain age -- say 35, maybe 40 -- the news was slightly unnerving. Even those who hadn't seen the big book since their childhood recognized a loss, not necessarily of a shopping aid but of an innocence and optimism and simplicity of desire that the catalog both thrived...
...willing buyers were not the only ones stirred by the yearly arrival of the book. Founder Richard Warren Sears' best marketing insight was to aim the catalog at rural America, where, throughout much of the 19th century, roughly 70% of the people lived. Never mind being unable to window-shop like their city cousins; many of these potential customers were looking for a place to buy inexpensive windows...
According to the course catalog, English Oyr will focus more on students' own work and less on history or Lee's movies, and enrollment will be limited to 15 students...