Long before Amazon, Shein and Temu discovered the revolutionary idea of selling people things they had never seen, every household in Britain and Ireland had at least one mail-order catalogue.
Usually there were several.
Littlewoods, Freemans, Kays, Grattan and various others arrived in the house looking like telephone directories printed in colour. They contained everything required for modern life: dresses, saucepans, bed linen, power tools, televisions, toys and underwear substantial enough to survive a house fire.
Young people may think Jeff Bezos invented shopping from home. He didn’t. We were buying trousers from the settee while Jeff was still in nappies.
The system was remarkably clever. Instead of maintaining websites, warehouses and delivery networks capable of bringing you a phone charger at three o’clock the following afternoon, catalogue companies recruited an army of housewives.
The housewife became an “agent”.
This sounded quite glamorous, suggesting she might be working undercover for the government. In reality, she carried a large catalogue around the neighbourhood and persuaded relatives, friends and people she vaguely knew to buy a candlewick bedspread at 32 pence a week.
There was often cooperation between agents. One woman had Littlewoods, her sister had Freemans and the neighbour had Kays. Between them, they offered more choice than a modern shopping centre, although everything came in either beige, brown or a shade described as “avocado”.
The great attraction was that you didn’t have to pay for an item all at once. You could spread the cost over twenty, thirty or forty weeks.
This sounded painless.
A winter coat costing £20 seemed completely unaffordable. The same coat at 50p a week felt almost free. Nobody thought too deeply about the fact that they would still be paying for it when spring arrived and possibly when it no longer fitted.
The real genius was that the catalogue company didn’t have to collect the money. That was the agent’s job.
She received a small commission, but only after everyone had paid. This turned otherwise pleasant women into the most determined debt collectors in Europe.
You might avoid a finance company. You could ignore a letter from the bank. But you could not escape Mrs McGinley standing at your front door on a Friday evening looking for the 37p you owed on a pair of curtains.
She knew you were inside.
She had seen the curtain move.
And, more importantly, she knew they were the very curtains you had bought from her catalogue.
There was no need for threatening letters or court proceedings. Her greatest weapon was local gossip. If you failed to make your payment, the news could travel through the neighbourhood before she reached the next house.
“Poor Mary is struggling with the payments on that trouser suit.”
Within days, people you had never met knew the colour, the size and the outstanding balance.
Credit ratings are impersonal things recorded on computers. A 1960s housewife could destroy your reputation over a cup of tea.
Delivery was another matter. Today, we become anxious if something ordered on Monday has not arrived by Wednesday. Catalogue customers were told to allow twenty-eight days.
Twenty-eight days!
You could order summer clothes in May and receive them in time for autumn. By the time a child’s shoes arrived, there was every possibility the child had gone up a size, left school or emigrated.
I suspect the companies didn’t actually possess most of the goods shown in the catalogue. Once your order arrived, someone probably began looking for a factory that could make it.
The catalogues themselves were a major source of family entertainment. Mothers spent hours examining dresses, curtains and household goods. Fathers went directly to the tools and electrical section, where they studied drills and record players they had no intention of buying.
Children concentrated on the toy pages, carefully selecting Christmas presents with no awareness whatsoever of the household finances.
Teenage boys had their own preferred section involving women’s underwear, but we will leave them there. They had enough to contend with already.
Then retailing expanded. Department stores appeared, town centres filled with fashion shops and electrical retailers, and shopping became the nation’s leading leisure activity. Families drove for miles to spend an entire Saturday walking around shops before returning home exhausted, bad-tempered and carrying something nobody had intended to buy.
The catalogue gradually disappeared.
Now, after all these years, town centres are struggling and we have gone back to ordering from home. We browse enormous online catalogues, choose goods from photographs and pay by instalments through Klarna.
We call it progress.
The only real difference is that delivery now takes a day instead of a month, and if you miss a payment, you receive an email rather than Mrs McGinley appearing at the door.
Something has been lost there.
Amazon may know your browsing history, bank details and buying habits, but it cannot lean over your garden gate and tell your neighbour you are three weeks behind on a nylon nightdress.
