Mail Order
By Dr. Larry Burriss
10/26/2026
Imagine for a moment where you would be without Amazon or any of the hundreds of other Internet mail order sites.
Well, for starters, you would probably be sitting in your car trying to find a parking space so you could go into the store. And once inside you’d be fighting the crowds and lines while dealing with crying babies and cranky spouses.
Sort of makes you want to go back to the Sears-Roebuck catalog, and the back-of-the-book advertising in comic books.
The massive Sears-Roebuck catalog came in at 14-hundred pages and weighed several pounds. It included more than 100-thousand items, including, at one time, clothes, toys, hardware, tools, dynamite and build-it-yourself home kits. All ready to ship to your home or office.
Now I’ve heard one of the most popular sections was the hundreds of pages of women’s, umm, unmentionables, read, or at least looked at, by preadolescent boys around the country.
And what about those mail-order ads at the back of action-hero comic books? Well, there were Charles Atlas he-man courses. You could learn how to secretly hypnotize that special girl in your school who never seemed to notice you; you could buy x-ray glasses or order a secret radio pen, or have a live squirrel monkey delivered right to your door.
Just send a dollar, or sometimes less, to the address at the bottom of the page.
Historians tell us the printed catalog mail order business died because of the Internet. But a couple of years ago I tried a little experiment. Beginning in September, I saved every Christmas catalog I received in the mail.
Well, that was a mistake. By Christmas I had amassed more than 150 catalogs, most of which were from companies I had never ordered anything from.
Of course, all of those catalogs contained a web site for ordering, so I guess even the most up-to-date Internet site still uses old-fashioned printed material to make a sale.
I’m Larry Burriss.
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