7 catalog shopping memories from the 70s that only Boomers can recall with nostalgic detail

My grandmother has this story she loves to tell about circling items in the Sears catalog with such intensity that she wore through the paper. She was maybe eight years old, making her Christmas wish list, and she went back to the same toy so many times that her pencil eventually created a hole right through the glossy pages.

That's the kind of relationship people had with catalog shopping in the 1970s.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I'm fascinated by the psychology of how we used to make purchasing decisions, and partly because the whole ritual seems almost unimaginable now. We talk about the convenience of online shopping, but we've lost something in the translation from paper to pixels.

So today, I want to explore seven catalog shopping memories from the 70s that only people who lived through that era can recall with real nostalgic detail.

1) The arrival of the catalog was an event

When that Sears Wish Book or JCPenney catalog arrived in the mail, it wasn't just another piece of junk mail.

It was the event of the week.

Families knew roughly when to expect it. Late August for the fall catalog. October or November for the Christmas edition. And when it finally showed up in that oversized package, there was genuine excitement.

The thing weighed more than some textbooks. The Sears Christmas catalog could be 600 pages long. It was substantial enough that you could use it to prop open a door or, if you were a kid, stand on it to reach something on a high shelf.

People would actually wait by the mailbox. They'd check with neighbors to see if theirs had arrived yet. The anticipation built for days, sometimes weeks.

Try explaining that level of excitement to someone who grew up with Amazon Prime.

2) Circling items was a family activity

Here's something that feels completely foreign now: catalog shopping was communal.

The whole family would gather around, usually on a weekend afternoon or after dinner. Each person got their own pen color. Blue for you, red for your brother, green for mom.

You'd flip through those glossy pages, circling what you wanted. Not just for Christmas, but for birthdays, for back to school, for no reason at all except that you were allowed to dream.

My grandmother says her kids would negotiate over who got to look at the toy section first. They'd spend hours with those catalogs, debating whether the brown corduroy pants were better than the green ones, or if that particular Barbie was worth the extra two dollars.

It wasn't just shopping. It was quality time. It was teaching kids about money, about choices, about what things cost.

That's something we've completely lost in the era of solo scrolling on our phones.

3) You had to fill out the order form by hand

This one requires some explanation for anyone under 40.

There was no "add to cart" button. Instead, saddle-stapled right into the middle of every catalog was a perforated order form that you had to carefully tear out without destroying any important information.

Then came the real work.

You had to write down the item number, which could be something like "29d8077" for a plush bonnet. You wrote the description. The size. The color. The quantity. The price. And then, and this is crucial, you had to do the math yourself to calculate the total.

No autocomplete. No saved addresses. No confirmation emails.

If you made a mistake in that item number, you might end up with a set of curtains instead of the dress you actually wanted. And you wouldn't know until weeks later when the package arrived.

The cognitive effort required to place a catalog order was significant. You couldn't just impulse buy at 2am in your pajamas. You had to commit.

4) Payment required actual money in the mail

People actually mailed cash.

I know that sounds reckless now, but it happened all the time. You'd wrap dollar bills in a few sheets of paper to hide them, stick them in the envelope with your order form, and just hope for the best.

More commonly, people used checks or money orders. But the point is, you had to physically send payment. There was no PayPal. No credit card numbers typed into a form. You were literally trusting the postal system with your money.

And here's the wild part: it mostly worked. The "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" policy that Montgomery Ward pioneered in 1875 actually meant something. These companies built trust over decades.

One story I came across while researching this described a farmer who wrote to Montgomery Ward explaining why he hadn't ordered in a while: "the cow kicked my arm and broke it and besides my wife was sick, and there was the doctor bill."

He was explaining himself to a catalog company. That's how personal the relationship felt.

5) The wait was measured in weeks, not days

Four to six weeks for delivery was standard.

Not two days. Not even a week. Four to six weeks.

For kids especially, this was an eternity. You'd place your order and then basically forget about it because dwelling on it would drive you crazy. Then one day, weeks later, a package would arrive and you'd remember that thing you ordered a month and a half ago.

There was no tracking number. No "out for delivery" notification. You just had to wait and hope.

I've mentioned this before but understanding delayed gratification is one of those psychological skills that's becoming increasingly rare. The catalog era forced you to develop it whether you wanted to or not.

The anticipation was actually part of the pleasure. By the time your item arrived, you'd built it up so much in your mind that even if it didn't quite match the glossy photo in the catalog, you were still excited.

6) Fashion was a complete gamble

Buying clothes from a catalog in the 1970s required either tremendous optimism or complete desperation.

There were no customer reviews. No "true to size" ratings. No ability to zoom in on fabric details. You got one photo, maybe two if you were lucky, and a brief description that told you almost nothing useful.

Will it fit? Who knows.

Will the color look the same in person? Probably not.

Will the polyester feel comfortable? Definitely not, but that's what everything was made of anyway.

Size charts existed, but they were notoriously unreliable. And since nearly everything was non-returnable or required you to pay return shipping, which could be expensive, you were taking a real risk every time you ordered clothing.

But people did it anyway, because for many families, especially those in rural areas, the catalog was the only way to access fashion beyond what the local general store carried.

The 1970s were also a wild time for fashion. High-waisted pants that came up to mid-chest. Leisure suits. Matching his-and-her Western shirts. Platform shoes in colors that shouldn't exist.

Those viral photos you see online of ridiculous 70s catalog pages? Those were real. People actually bought that stuff. And then wore it. On purpose.

7) Catalogs were also reference books and dream books

Here's something that might not be obvious: people kept these catalogs for months, sometimes years.

They served multiple purposes beyond shopping. Need to know how much a washing machine cost? Check the catalog. Want to see what's trendy in kitchen decor? Catalog. Trying to figure out what to give someone for their wedding? You guessed it.

Kids used them for school projects. Adults used them as references for comparison shopping. And everyone used them for dreaming.

My grandmother says she used to cut pictures out of catalogs to make vision boards before that was even a term. She'd paste images of furniture and appliances she wanted someday into a scrapbook.

The Sears catalog was so ubiquitous in American homes that it was sometimes called "the Consumer's Bible." Between 1908 and 1940, Sears even sold entire houses through their catalog. About 70,000 homes were purchased this way, and an estimated 70% still stand today.

That's how deeply embedded catalog shopping was in American culture. It shaped not just how people bought things, but how they thought about their homes, their style, their aspirations.

The bottom line

Catalog shopping in the 1970s was an exercise in patience, trust, and imagination.

You had to believe that the company would send you the right item, that your payment wouldn't disappear into the void, and that what arrived would be close enough to what you circled in those glossy pages.

It was slower. It required more effort. It left more room for error.

But it also created space for anticipation, for family connection, for learning to make careful choices when you couldn't just return everything with a click.

I'm not saying it was better than what we have now. Convenience matters. Speed matters. Having options matters.

But something was lost when we traded in those thick paper catalogs for infinite scroll and one-click ordering.

Maybe it's just nostalgia. Or maybe it's recognition that the friction in the old system, annoying as it was, served a purpose we didn't fully appreciate until it was gone.