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Free Mail Order Catalog Request


Mail order catalogs have become so commonplace that we simply take them for granted and fail to stop to contemplate the fact that it was not so very long ago when they came into being and the history around that event is what I would like to address here.  Before I proceed, however, I would like to define a couple of terms which would ensure that we all have a clear understand of the jargon in question.

A mail order which is also known as a postal order is a term referring to a shopping method which involves purchasing merchandise or services and having them delivered via mail services.  A customer places an order with a merchant who may be located just about anywhere in the world and the merchant responds by fulfilling the order and sending it.

Mail orders worked just fine and were a great convenience to customers as longs as the list of merchants was short and their products few.  But when mail ordering became a desired trend, many more merchants came into the picture with many more products and the aforethought convenience turned out to be burdensome.  It became virtually impossible to keep track of which merchant sells what products.  And that was when smart thinkers came up with the idea of a catalog.

A mail order catalog is a published list of products and / or services that are sold by a specific merchant or a mail order company.  In today’s market, such published lists have taken on the look and feel of magazines and are distributed via postal or mail services or through the Internet.

The National Mail Order Association (www.NMOA.org) maintains that it was Benjamin Franklin who was the first mail order catalog merchant in the United States when, in 1744, he produced the first catalog in which he sold scientific and academic books.  Similarly and as a side note, Benjamin Franklin was also the first to offer a mail order guarantee by stating that “”Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to B. Franklin may depend on the same justice as if present.”

Aaron Montgomery Ward produced the first mail order catalog for Montgomery Ward, the giant retail chain store, in 1872.  His first catalog consisted of a single page that displayed a list of about a dozen farming related items.  But within a relatively short span of twenty years, Montgomery’s one page mail order catalog grew to a huge tome-like catalog of 540 pages that included over 20,000 attractively illustrated products.

The longest running mail order catalog in the United States was first published in 1848 for a merchant called Alfred Hammacher and it is known today as Hammacher Schlemmer (http://www.hammacher.com/) and offers a very diverse and wide ranging collection of miscellany.

Of course, in today’s highly technological world the mail order catalog business has expanded tremendously and offers many more options beginning with the ordering process and ending with the delivery of the products and / or services.  In addition, the merchandise and services included in the current mail order catalog market are quite literally infinite.  The basic concept, however, has remained the same and the options which are available today are as follows:

  • Placing the order via telephone, fax machine, email, text message, online, mailed postcard or form.
  • Payment options are credit cards, debit cards, personal checks, money orders, bank notes, cash, online payment services or cash on delivery (C.O.D.)
  • Shipping address is provided by the customer.  It may be the customer’s own address, the customer’s office address, an address to a local retail store to be picked up by the customer, or an address to a third party consumer which is a great option for sending gifts.
  • Method of shipping is often determined by the urgency of the order, by the cost involved and by the distance between the customer and the merchant.  Delivery can be handled by the United States Postal Services (U.S.P.S.) or any number of other carriers.  If, due to its urgency, the order has been classified as an express order, it will most likely be delivered by an overnight air carrier.
  • What can a customer buy via today’s mail order catalogs?  Everything and anything that is not outright illegal!

Additional early mail order catalogs that are still found today and the years in which they were founded are:

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