Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Old Mail Order Catalogs

Herters, Sears, Wards,and in Canada, Simpson Sears, and Eaton's, others?

Do you still some shop mail order, or mostly online?

I used to buy a lot of stuff through Netcraft. Tackle and rod building supplies mostly.

EBay has most anything a person would want. And there is GunBroker.

I learned how the world works through the Sears catalog. When I discovered they had specialty catalogs you could order I ordered the farming and ranching catalog (or whatever it was called). It showed me a whole new world!

For instance, dozens of kinds of fence wire. That gave me a lot to think about regarding the different needs of horses, calves, goats, chickens, excluding rabbits from a garden and on and on. Incubators, all kinds of waterers. All different kinds of shovels, scoops and forks, each with a distinct purpose. I was a city kid who felt like he had crash-landed on an alien planet and wanted so badly to live a rural life. The Sears catalog showed me what I might find there.

I wish I could remember all the specialty catalogs they had. Industrial catalog, auto shop catalog. I bet they had a dozen of them.

always been a mail order/on-line buyer..........

usually no tax/free shipping..........except Amazon is taxed now for Utah residents....

Gun Broker........good for buying...if you get a deal...........

selling ? fees are high...........but the site gets alot of traffic.........

Cabelas..Bass Pro...........can all take a hike...........

I've always been a big fan of flipping though catalogs for my hobbies. I don't recall the last time I actually received a catalog and called in an order, I've been ordering online for a long time.

Use to sit for hours going through the Herters catalog

I used to spend hours going through catalogs looking at stuff.

Then there were, and are all the seed catalogs, Early May, Henry Field, and more.

J C Whitney had a ton of car and truck stuff. I remember getting the original Gander Mountain catalogs. They gave Cabelas a lot of competition back in the day. Herters even had their own branded 4 wheel compound bows. Remember the old 4 wheel bows. I LOVED getting catalogs in the mail before Gores invented the interweb.

Remember when puberty stricken young boys learnt about sex thru moms JC Penney lingerie catalog?

Yeah, I spent a fair amount of time looking at the women's swimsuit and underwear sections back in the day. Sears & Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Spiegel. That was more than 55 years or so ago! I remember well the Gander Mountain catalog also. My father used to get a sales paper that was about the size of Shotgun News that was called the Construction Bargaineer. It was full of all sorts of used construction equipment, such as trucks, bulldoziers, army surplus equipment, generators, jeeps, etc. Also army surplus catalog from Ruvel & Co. and a few others I cannot seem to recall. I spent quite a few hours browsing them all. I remember we actually mailed in orders to Sears and Gander Mountain and others. No such thing as telephone orders as there was no credit card numbers to pay with. All orders were handwritten and mailed with a check or money order. Seems like ancient times now. I actually remember seeing and using pages from a catalog in an old outhouse at a country church as toilet paper. Kinda reminds me of that old Joe South song: "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home" - ..."but the river don't flow and the grass don't grow like it did in my childhood days"...

The Herters catalog had everything anybody would need...coming from a small town far from anything, it was our window to the world. Great place for a young kid to get lost for hours. Several years back my brother gave me an original 1964 Herter's catalog for Christmas.

you are dating yourself as Herters took the dirt nap about 40 years ago, about the same time Sears and Monkey Wards did

Amazon is no longer the cheapest place online to buy stuff. Little by little, they've jacked up their prices. Almost invariably, I can shop on Amazon but end up buying elsewhere at a lower price, including shipping. Of course 'free' shipping isn't. They just hide it in the prices.

The only outhouse advise I got was stay away from the slick pages!!

Internet shopping replaced mail order catalogs for me a longtime ago but as a kid I looked forward to the big Sears, JC Penny's, Cabelas, and Gander Mountain catalogs.

I probably have a few old Sears Crafstman tool catalogs around here someplace. If I find one I am going to hang on to it. Sears ain't long for this world.

As I remember cabelas bought out the gander mt catalogue devission.....that was the story anyway.....that was way before cabelas got huge....they still just had the Sydney and Kearny stores.....I think that was in the 80 s ...I too liked the gander catalogues ...

I used to order a bunch of tackle thru them as a kid as well.