Word: ward
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fearing the answer, shopkeepers are bracing for what may be the toughest Christmas selling season in a decade. Says Bernard Brennan, chief executive of Montgomery Ward: "There are more negative dynamics working than at any other time I've seen in my entire marketing career." After a year in which retail sales barely kept up with a 4.8% inflation rate, merchants have watched even that shopping pace flag just before the onset of the most important selling season of the year, one that typically accounts for as much as 60% of annual retail profits. Overall, sales (excluding gasoline) fell...
Certainly it has revolutionized the way Americans conduct business. Once upon a time, direct mail evoked only two names: Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears. Ward, a Midwest traveling salesman, had a simple idea: "Sell directly to the consumer and save them the profit of the middleman." In 1872 he published a one-page listing of 163 items, from red flannel cloth to oilcloth table covers, and mail order as we know it today was born. Fourteen years later, Sears, a Minnesota railroad-station agent, decided to mail a few $12 watches to his peers for $14 apiece. When the ploy...
Over the next six decades, the explosion of merchandise catalogs was so immense that competition from more specialized retailers finally demolished one of its originators: in 1985 Montgomery Ward left the catalog business. Today's big sellers include J.C. Penney, L.L. Bean, Lands' End and Sears. In 1989 Bean, the famous Maine purveyor of outdoor gear, took in almost 90% of its $600 million net sales from the 116 million catalogs it mailed. Wisconsin's Lands' End sold $545 million worth of clothing and domestic items last year through its 90 million catalogs. "It's always fun to have them...
...work much harder than members of Congress to address their pitches to specific audiences. To sing their siren songs effectively, they rely on a bewildering variety of list compilers, list brokers and list managers. In short, the mail-order industry is teeming with precisely the sort of people Montgomery Ward set out to eliminate: middlemen...
COPY DESK: Judith Anne Paul, Shirley Barden Zimmerman (Deputies); Barbara Dudley Davis, Evelyn Hannon, Jill Ward (Copy Coordinators); Minda Bikman, Doug Bradley, Robert Braine, Bruce Christopher Carr, Barbara Collier, Julia Van Buren Dickey, Dora Fairchild, Judith Kales, Sharon Kapnick, Claire Knopf, Gyavira Lasana, Melinda J. McAdams, M.M. Merwin, Anna F. Monardo, Maria A. Paul, Elyse Segelken, Terry Stoller, Amelia Weiss (Copy Editors...