We are now into the dreaded, annual Christmas shopping frenzy. I like to break it down into two components.
The first is the chaos of Black Friday at the crowded big box stores. The pushing and shoving that occurs is crazy. It’s a real madhouse situation.
The second component is the frantic, last minute shopping just before Christmas. Again, it is a madhouse.
Some of this can be avoided by shopping on the computer. The amount of online sales hit a record for this year’s Black Friday. Maybe, that is the wave of the future of Christmas shopping.
Is this concept new?? It has been around for many years.
During my formative years, 1935-55, as a developing McGill heathen, we used a similar system. There were no big stores full of goodies in the immediate area. The local stores, Goodman-Tidball, McGill Drugstore, The KCC Commissary and L.C. Cononelos Dry Goods, had a limited amount of goodies. During WWII there wasn’t much at all. I remember as kids we usually got things made by our parents.
McGill’s biggest Christmas store was, of course, the Post Office. That was where parents went to mail off their Christmas lists to Sears and Roebucks or Montgomery Wards (AKA Monkey Wards) and other mail order houses.
Mail order houses were started by Aaron Montgomery Ward (1843-1913) at Chicago in 1872.
They were the only way we could ‘window shop’ in those bygone days. We heathens spent many a night, thumbing through the pages of toys in those catalogs. Now, kids do the same on their smartphones.
Some folks wonder what will happen to the stores if everyone buys online. The same question could have been asked about the catalog sales doing the same damage. The answer is that the stores will figure out a way to compete and stay solvent. That is the American way.
I always wondered what happened to Sears. They had a worldwide distribution set up and yet Amazon beat them to the punch. Did not Sears management see what was happening??
The same thing might be happening to Amazon, with the fantastic growth of publicsq.com. This is a new company that allows small, (mom and pop)businesses to put their products and services online, at no cost. As a result, there are some really nice and unique products to choose from. I plan to do my shopping there this year. Kinda like looking through a Sears or Wards catalog.
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