You might remember them-- something like the Sears catalog back in 1980. That thing was bigger than the phone book, and I sat on it at dinner so I could reach the table properly.
With the shift from mail-order to web-based sales, are there any free 300+ page catalogs left out there?
I dunno if Argos operates in the US but it has a free 300+ page catalogue, revised periodically.
what’s the hunting/camo one that was just discussed here recently? Starts with a C. Cabela’s.
The JCPenney’s catalogue is pretty dense.
Our office gets a massive office type stuff catalog every 6 months or so… it’s something significantly over 400 pages. Mostly desks and chairs and stuff, but also things like coffee, printer ink and cookies!
Also, Ikea normally puts out a fairly significant catalogue once a year… advertising their maximum price for the next 9-12 months. Probably under 100 pages, but not by much.
I haven’t seen catalogs quite as big as Sears in its heyday, but I regularly get 300+ page catalogs from B&H and McMaster-Carr. (As I recall, McMaster has several large catalogs divided up by subject area; maybe I only get one of them.)
Grainger’s catalog is probably about 4 inches thick or so.
MSC Direct offers an almost identical (in function) catalog.
I’ve bought a bit of stuff from B&H Photo in New York, and for a while they were sending me their catalog, which usually ran to quite a few hundred pages. After a few issues, i asked them to stop, because i am a frequent visitor to their website anyway, and don’t need more paper to recycle every month.
Penney’s is huge, yep.
And I get a catalog from an education company that looks like a phone book–it’s nearly 3" thick, with the pages of thin newsprint paper–I think it’s over 1000 pages, easily. Most of their business is probably web-based, but there’s so much that you have to look through the catalog first to figure out what you want. The catalog is free, you just request it over the website.
Oh, oh, and Demco’s catalog is huge. They sell library furniture and supplies. It’s as big as the Penney’s catalog.
Though I don’t believe its free (I may be wrong, though). This might’ve been sears, but I’m pretty sure I was in JCPenny.
A year or so ago I was walking though the store and saw an employee yell to a customer “Stop! Hey! You have to pay for that catalog!”
I look at the catalog in the hand of the woman who is walking away… Then back to the counter where the woman is yelling. Stacked there are some 20 JCPenny catalogs.
WTF? You have to pay… to…
o…k…
It was an odd revelation for me, I vaguely remember the big catalogs but had no idea you had to actually buy them… to buy things from them.
I just got my quarterly 3" catalog from Mouser
I get two from B&H that are massive. 2-3" thick. One for digital and one for film. Unsolicited too, which was annoying since I’m only going to buy stuff in person or on the web.
I think they used to be free. Now I think they are “free if you use them”… you buy them, and then you get that cost discounted off your first catalog purcahse.
All the library stuff catalogs are pretty big - we get Demco and Gaylord and a couple others.
I’ve got a collection of Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. I just grabbed the Sears fall/winter 1940-1941 off the shelf. It had 1264+ pages.
I’ve never seen anything like that recently.
Get yourself a subscription to In Style magazine. Make sure your mail box is reinforced first though. It isn’t technically a catalog but everything it is annotated with the price and source. I will have to look at the page count but it is easilly as big as many of the print catalogs of yore.
The MSC catalog is currently so big (around 5000 pages) that it must be hardbound, and arrives in a carton, not just a plastic wrapper. Think unabridged dictionary. If it grows any more they will need to split it into two volumes.
Slight hijack: are there still any old-school catalog stores in existence, like the long-forgotten Best and Service Merchandise?
Hear Hear!
I was just yesterday telling my daughter about the wonder that is the Service Merchandise catalog! It had toys! Super reference book for filling out your Christmas list…
And then I told her about the “Pickup” system they had when you checked out. And thinking about it, I was wondering why some stores didn’t do it that way anymore.