Wednesday, 12 October 2011 15:48
A thousand years from now, when scholars and archeologists in some future civilization want to know what America was like, they could do no better than dig up a stash of Montgomery Ward catalogs, from 1900 to when it was discontinued in 2001. First, they will find depicted thousands of products available to the general public at very moderate prices. They will find that most of these products were made in the U.S.A. They will find a nation with a very high standard of living, continually improving its technology in all fields of endeavor. The beauty of the catalog is that it will provide the future researcher with a pictorial view of a society and all of the objects it used in its daily life during a specific year of its existence. And behind all these objects were thousands of factories that manufactured all the products Montgomery Ward was selling. The future investigators will not realize from the pictures that the catalogs from 1930 to 1945 depicted a nation during a great economic depression. The only thing that indicates something about the general condition of the economy is the number of pages of each year’s catalog. For example, the 1906 catalog has 1148 pages, while the 1933 catalog has only 494 pages. You can easily trace the condition of the U.S. economy by simply making a graph of the number of pages in each year’s catalog.
The catalogs also show us the continued improvement in the products being offered. One can see the evolution of the washing machine and refrigerator, the cooking stove, and home heater, radios and phonographs, television sets. It shows capitalism at work, constantly making life easier and better. And the process never ends even though the economy goes through its ups and downs.
Another revelation is that prices were pretty stable from 1905 to the early 1950s. In 1904-1905 a Remington Derringer sold for $5, a Colt Pocket Revolver for $11, a work shirt for 50 cents, shoes for $2.75. In 1933, a bath towel was 18 cents, work pants 69 cents, a mattress $5.95, a woman’s coat $7.94, a sewing machine $19.95, and rifles sold from $5.65 to $26.98. In 1936-37, refrigerators cost from $96.50 to $139.95, women’s stockings 33 cents, dresses $3.98, a housecoat $1.00, a boy’s shirt 59 cents, Ward’s Aspirin 19 cents for 100 tablets. In 1941-42 hunting rifles cost from $8.45 to $68.20, dresses from $1.98 to $2.98, and refrigerators from $103.50 to 146.95. By 1958 refrigerators had gone up to from $279.95 to 399.95.
Inflation was beginning to raise the price of everything.
By 1962, the catalog had 1488 pages, and the consumer economy began to take off. One of the ways that Montgomery Ward was able to offer its products at low prices was a COD, cash-on-delivery system. The company was able to buy huge quantities of products at the lowest cost by paying cash and selling them to the customer for cash.
Naturally, the local merchants in the small towns and farming communities were as much opposed to catalog selling as many of today’s local merchants oppose WalMart. Their prices were high because they could not buy in quantity and often had to use credit with high interest rates. But Montgomery Ward was able to make a good profit by selling at the lowest possible prices... read more>>
