While BIG Box Stores Suffer, Catalogs Sure Haven't

     

     Mail order catalogs seem to have been an American invention. The first general mail catalog is the Montgomery Ward catalog that was produced on August 18, 1872. And while many businesses were already publishing mail order catalogs, it was Aaron Montgomery Ward that is credited for producing the first mail order catalog meant for the national general public. It wasn't long though before Sears & Roebuck produced their own, a venerable institution until it's demise.

     Sears & Roebuck originally started in 1886 as a watch mail order company in 1886. Their first mail catalog was in 1888, a good 12 years after Wards. However, when rural delivery became free in 1896, Sears, Wards and other vendor's catalog mailing exploded. I can remember as a kid in the 1950's waiting for the Sears Christmas catalog. If you're a Boomer or earlier you know exactly what I mean. Kids today really do miss out.

     As a marketing and advertising major in Journalism School our director said that the only books we needed were ... the Bible, The Works of Shakespeare AND the Sears catalog. All three, he said, told complete stories in as few words as necessary. If you ever read a Sears catalog, despite 1,000's of items, after looking at the photo and reading the description you had NO doubt what the item was, how it looked and what it could do usually in 100 words or less. I can think of many web sites that could learn or lesson or two from this! While the Sears catalog ceased publication in 1993 (you can just about see the beginning of it's demise about that time. The biggest retailer started to fail as Walmart became the biggest retailer), its lessons seem to have been remembered. 

Christmas catalogs received

in ONE week last November!

     While big box stores, Kmart, Sear, Macy's, Penney's, Forever 21 and many more are closing stores or declaring bankruptcies, never to be seen again, if anything, I am getting more catalogs than ever before. Internet sales may be booming, but so are catalogs! What's even more interesting is that while you often see things you would never find in a store, often they are also available at such sites as Amazon who sells that item cheaper and if a Prime member, with free shipping! Yet, they keep coming!!!

     You have to wonder, what and why? If you were to design a "comfort" food or item, nothing beats a casual stroll through pages ... printed or digital, in the comfort of your home. You also find things that while available online, you might never have been aware of until you saw it in a catalog. It can be trying to find things on Amazon. Here in your lap is the thing you were looking for, looking back at you on the printed page!

Catalogs received this week!

  Shopping today is such a miserable hassle. Depending on where you live, if you are single, married or married with children you have to get everyone dressed in something, then go to the car, load everyone in after making sure all windows, doors, lights and appliances are turned off, doors locked, then driving to the mall which once took 10 minutes but today can be an hours long trip. You arrive mad at the stupid drivers, the kids bickering in the back seat, a disagreement with the spouse of where you will go once there ... the "purpose" of the trip, then finding a place to park and depending on the weather slogging to the entrance. As if to add insult to injury, you also take a quick glance around to see where to hide if some crazed gunman wants to add a sense of adventure to your shopping chores.  And worse, if you live in California you have to bring your own bag or be charged for everyone you get from the seller. So the back of my SUV has a bundle of bags that I somehow manage to forget every time I go to the store or mall! Need a bag?

     WHY do that? Stay home, leaf through your catalogs, fill out the order form, put a stamp on it, put it in the mailbox and take a nap.

     Rather than adding stress to our lives, we can relax and depending, wait to receive our package. I am sure that's why such sites as Wayfair, Overstocck.com and just about every catalog out there also send you emails to order online. They are covering their bases and audience. At 74 I find that I like holding the catalog and reading the pages rather than looking at a screen that makes it difficult to flip back and forth between items. I have yet to find any digital store's pages that equals the same experience as a printed catalog. Maybe digital takes a certain age to use. Yet, those catalogs keep coming so someone, somewhere is still ordering from them!

    

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed! 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!

     

BIG BROTHER Is Here and We Barely Notice It!

Growing up in the 50's there were all kinds of threats and fears about the Commies. There was a show I watched as a kid where the "good" guys caught a "Commie" each and every week. No kid could escape the fear of a Soviet atomic bomb with the regular drills to drop and cover under our desks during an atomic bomb attack. Yeah, we would have all fried in place under our desks. Even at 9 and 10 I could understand the fear of Eugene McCarty's list of Communists in government and the blacklisting of many in the movie industry.

   As a late bloomer in reading I soon caught up and was reading any book I wanted after my mother sent a note to the local librarian with that very message the 7th grade. I remember seeing the movie first and then reading George Orwell's chilling 1984. Shot in grainy black and white, it depicted a society (what we thought it was like living in the Soviet Union) where every citizen was watched and for any deviation of correct thinking was removed for "education" much like several societies I can think of today. It was, for a young, red-blooded American an almost unbelievable concept. We lived in a free society and could do and say just about anything we wanted. Or so we thought.

     Over the years much as been made of the idea of "1984's Big Brother" both coming toward and after. The 1984 Super Bowl ad of Apple introducing the Apple Macintosh is one of the more memorable concepts. Yet while the Mac definitely revolutionised computing becoming the first salvo into the technological world we live in today, it was not quite what Orwell had in mind. OR, was it?

     I just finished Christopher Wylie's book MINDF*CK and if he gives us any warning it is that not only is Big Brother here, so is big sister, Uncle Sam, just about every government, politician and every advertiser in the world. We are definitely not alone.

Christopher Wylie

     So we have a 30 year old telling how from about the age of 16 he became a kind of technological wiz in understanding and harvesting "big data." For those of you that don't know, big data is all the information various agencies have on file about us, about you! Whether we have a card for credits at the grocery store, our census records, doctor records, credit cards and payment histories, what we do online through Facebook, YouTube, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Twitter and a whole bunch more of online looking and shopping; data is collected about you.

     From a rather small beginning in the UK, the firm SCL whose purpose was to collect not only data but big data that could be used to influence people. Money came from the British government, our DARPA, the Russians and was used to test the idea they could sway people to do things. They used this data in Caribbean islands and African elections. But they needed more money and far more data. So Wylie helped in the creation of a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA) that managed to get data that FACEBOOK was collecting on it's social network to drum up more advertising. Yes, every click, and share and photo post gives them more and more information about you.

   About this time, around 2014-2015 Steve Bannon, a close friend of Donald Trump and owner of the very rightwing BREITBART was brought in to see and hopefully invest in this big data. Bannon instantly understood what could be achieved and the rest is history. However, not only did the Trump Campaign understand this but so did the Russians. With a population of less than half of the United States and far fewer resources and under heavy sanctions they figured out that the best way to demoralize America was to turn it against itself via propaganda.

    There was an immensely popular movie in the early 60's called THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, starring Frank Sinatra I might add, that tells the story of Korean prisoners of war that were brainwashed during captivity and at a certain signal would complete the program they were hypnotized to finish, in this case, an assassination. The original was a nail biter and for many, it was something that couldn't be done though some thought it could. However, CA proved that using your data it could be done based on your likes and dislikes. They discovered that what people said and what they privately thought were often different. This could be and many fear it has been exploited.

     Soon after Facebook was forced to allow users to download and print out the data they had on them, a reporter on ABC was stunned to find there was over 1,000 pages on her and finally she stopped the printer. There, on her desk, were hundreds of sheets of paper all detailing the data Facebook had on her.

     What Wylie is saying that in that 85 million user breach on Facebook that CA harvested, the actual number was far greater. Every person who was a friend, friends of friends and so on were included. Not millions but hundreds of millions of profiles and data on each and every one was harvested. 

     While he left before the politicians were using it in the United States he could see the results from Canada and felt that he had no choice but to blow the whistle on the monster that he had created.

     Design, design, design. You may be sick of my mantra but everything we do is designed for us or against us ... we even do the same thing to ourselves and others. You cannot hide your head in the sand anymore. It may be too late and now, at the age of 74 I could see why Issac Asimov created a world in his FOUNDATION TRILOGY that outlawed robots. However, they did use psycho-history to predict future events, quite similar to predicting a world not unlike ours today. Will we allow it to be true or, finally, put the brakes on what we share, finally learning what privacy really means? I urge you to read this book. If you are reading this blog you are on the Internet and they are watching.

Thank you for reading my blog. I invite you to take the time to read earlier blogs where my emphasis is to explore the ways art and design affects our daily lives ... and always has. I share with you what inspires me with the hope that it will inspire you as well. Comments are always welcomed! 

Be sure to check my ETSY store ... KrugsStudio.etsy.com. I am adding many new and exciting, collectible birdhouses and craft items. Many of the items talked about here will be for sale there!