Mail order houses

Mail-order houses, along with Department Stores and chain stores, were the most important innovations in retailing institutions during the late nineteenth century. Unlike the other two, however, mail-order houses were essentially a unique American phenomenon in their extent and significance. Indeed, because the majority of Americans still lived in rural settings before the 1920s, they often first experienced the emerging national consumer culture through the medium of the mail-order catalogor, as many called it, the "wish book."

Montgomery Ward and Sears

Before the 1860s a few firms (for example, patent medicine vendors) advertised the availability of their wares by mail in newspapers and agricultural journals, but general merchandise mailorder houses were first established after the Civil War. During the 1870s Augusta, Maine, became host to a number of nationally circulated periodicals, like E. C. Allen's People's Literary Companion and P. O. Vickery's Comfort. These were known as mail-order magazines because they were read mostly forand derived the bulk of their income fromadvertisements; many of these magazines flourished for decades. More important, however, was Montgomery Ward, the first mail-order house to use catalogs as its primary promotional tool. Founded by Aaron Montgomery Ward and his brother-in-law in 1872 and based in the railroad hub of Chicago, where it was able to take full advantage of the burgeoning national transportation infrastructure, Montgomery Ward's was closely affiliated with the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange movement. A widespread animus against local merchants and their country stores, which usually featured overpriced, small, and limited inventories, prompted agrarian attempts to avoid "parasitic middlemen" in the retail trade. By the early 1890s the Montgomery Ward general catalog had become hundreds of pages long and offered nearly 25,000 items for sale. Of the many firms that quickly followed Montgomery Ward into the mail-order trade, its most important competitor was the company founded by Richard W. Sears. Beginning in 1886 as a vendor of watches and reorganized several times through the early 1900s, in 1893 Sears began offering a general merchandise catalog that soon rivaled Ward's in size and variety. Moreover, Richard Sears was a master of promotional copy. Bucking the trend, he filled every available inch of ad space with text as well as illustrations. His catalog instructions were designed to make the farmer feel comfortable and secure, emphasizing liberal return policies ("Satisfaction Guaranteed"). With the addition of Julius Rosenwald as a partner in 1895, the company's administration and operations were increasingly systematized, and by the time it occupied a new forty-acre Chicago facility in 1906, Sears's sales were nearly $40 million annually, surpassing Ward's in total sales. The two leading mail-order houses would remain major national rivals for much of the twentieth century. Some urban department stores, such as Macy's, followed suit with their own catalog sales departments, although with mixed results. Other mail-order houses specialized in particular types of goods, like the Larkin Company, a Buffalo, New York, soap manufacturer that began

distributing nonperishable groceries by mail beginning in 1885, or National Bellas Hess, a Chicago clothing apparel concern. Spiegel, May, and Stern was founded in 1882 as a Chicago furniture retailer and moved into the mail-order trade in 1904; the company would gain national renown for its sales on installment credit (a practice previously known to rural folk mainly through the auspices of the itinerant peddler), helping prompt other mail-order houses to follow suit.

Improvements in Postal Service

Indispensable to the growth of the mail-order industry were improvements in the federal postal service. In 1875 a more favorable rate for bulk mailings of periodical and other "educational" literature was established and was lowered by half again a decade latera boon to mail-order magazines and smaller catalogs. During his tenure as postmaster general in the early 1890s, the department store magnate John Wanamaker authorized the first experiments with rural free delivery (RFD) of mail, a system that became fully national by 1902. Even more important, Wanamaker and others campaigned for the creation of a parcel post system to ease the restrictions on rural deliveries. Most shipments were still handled by a small number of powerful express companies, whose welter of regulations and high prices hampered growth and efficiency, and farm customers had to make the often arduous trek into town to pick up goods that they had ordered. The steadfast opposition of local merchants and the express companies to a federal parcel post system, however, delayed its adoption until 1913. In an age sensitive to the charge of monopolistic privilege, the major mail-order houses carefully avoided leading the push toward parcel post, but the system proved doubly beneficial to them: not only was it less expensive and more convenient for customers, but it also significantly dropped the cost of distributing catalogs. Parcel post reform combined with rising farm incomes to make the period from 1910 to 1925 the golden age of mail order. Taken together, Sears and Montgomery Ward sold over $400 million of goods annually by 1925, and that same year Sears's mail-order sales alone accounted for over 2 percent of total farm cash income.

Retail Outlets and Specialized Mail Order

The two mail-order giants, however, saw the writing on the wall. The increasing personal mobility made possible by the automobile, the incursion of chain stores like J. C. Penney's into small-town markets, and the demographic trend toward an increasingly urban-based population all meant that rural mail-order sales had probably peaked. Beginning in the mid-1920s, each began to diversify operations to include retail outlets; by the 1950s, these stores would become their leading sources of income. Mail-order retailing remained big business through the end of the twentieth century, but companies tended to thrive with more specialized niche marketing. The Sharper Image, L. L. Bean, and Victoria's Secret were all examples of using upscale mail-order appeals as a successful entering wedge into the enormous American consumer market. Although e-commerce barely accounted for 1 percent of total retail sales at the end of the century, its reliance on shipping goods ordered online using credit cards represented a lucrative new form of mail-order industry. Still, signaling the end of an era for many, Montgomery Ward and Sears discontinued their

general merchandise catalogs in 1985 and 1993, respectively; when Ward's went out of business in 2000, the mail-order industry had lost its pioneer.

ibliography
Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991. A wide-ranging book with excellent sections on the significance of the mail-order industry for Chicago and its hinterlands. Emmet, Boris, and John E. Jeuck. Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. A still-classic work based on extensive research in company archives. Smalley, Orange A., and Frederick D. Sturdivant. The Credit Merchants: A History of Spiegel, Inc. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Places mail-order houses in the context of the late-nineteenth-century revolution in retailing.

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