The Mail-Order Catalog
What Montgomery Ward printed on 18 August 1872 was a single sheet of paper, eight inches by twelve. On the two sides: 163 items, their prices, and how to order. That was all. In 1875 he added «satisfaction guaranteed or your money back», and four years later it had grown to 152 pages and 3,000 items. What actually made this business possible was not the shop but the country's infrastructure — Rural Free Delivery from 1896, and parcel post in 1913. Until then, nothing over four pounds could go by mail at all. By 1919, spending through mail-order catalogs passed five hundred million dollars a year, half of it with Sears and Ward. A century later the same model was reborn on a screen, as e-commerce.