The Backstory: Shocking Items from the Sears Catalog

Even if we don’t love it, most of us rely on Amazon for a lot of our basic shopping needs. But 140 years ago, the Victorian version of Amazon arrived on the scene. The Sears catalog was just as huge as Amazon, at one point reaching 2/3rds of all Americans and accounting for 1% of the entire U.S. economy. They sold and delivered everything... even heroin!

Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover... on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So do you love shopping?

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Maybe you enjoy it sometimes, but not always when it
involves a trip to the store when you're already busy. Well,
lately a lot of our basic household needs involve browsing
Amazon or Target or Walmart or even Costco and clicking.
But almost one hundred and forty years ago, folks got
the same shopping thrill when a brand new service opened up.

(00:22):
I'm Patty Steele the catalog that had everything you needed,
from clothes to baby chickens, to gravestones, even Heroin. That's
next on the backstory. The backstory is back. As much
as I would rather try stuff on, feel it, snivet,
taste it, there are times when the convenience of finding

(00:43):
it on my phone, clicking on it, and getting it
at my door without ever having to go to the
store is all I want. Right Well, imagine what the
shopping experience was like for folks in the eighteen eighties,
particularly if.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
You lived in rural areas.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Not only were well stocked stores few and far between,
there was the difficulty of actually getting to them with
maybe a horse and wagon or a train. Then something
happened to change all that. It's eighteen eighty eight, Sears,
Roebuck and Company has sent out its first mail order catalog.
In the beginning, it was only watches and jewelry, but

(01:19):
the company realizes pretty quickly they're onto something. By the
early nineteen hundreds, the Seers catalog has a huge number
of items available that folks out in the sticks have.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Never even seen before.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
You know that failing when you'll walk into maybe a
costco and you'll walk out not only with stuff you needed,
but a bunch of stuff you never heard of until
you discovered a giant box of it there. Well, that
was the Seers Catalog for two thirds of Americans at
its peak. In fact, as recently as nineteen sixty nine,
Seers sales accounted for one percent of the entire US economy.

(01:56):
Forty percent of all appliances sold came from Seers in
rural areas. Much like Amazon everywhere today, the Seer's Catalog
was the source for things like clothing, including wedding dresses,
household needs, farm equipment, toys.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Pretty much anything you can think of.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Imagine how it changed the lives of people who simply
didn't have the time, proximity, or wherewithal to see what
was available to buy much less, actually buy those things
at a fair price and get them delivered to your home.
The Seer's catalog was the go to for one stop
shopping furniture, appliances, linens, tools, seeds for planting gardens, baby carriages,

(02:36):
and guns. They even sold puppies, baby chickens, and ducks
and donkeys, as well as the food to feed them.
It was a whole new world, and they famously sold
complete kits to build a house. One hundred thousand of
them were sold from nineteen o eight up until the
nineteen forties. They came in three hundred and seventy different styles,

(02:57):
from colonials to smaller bungalows. Kits cost anywhere from six
hundred bucks to six thousand, and came with all the lumber, windows, doors, pipes, cabinets,
even doorknobs, nails and paint utilities, and assembly was the
buyer's responsibility at any rate. A lot of kit houses
are still standing and they get scooped up when they

(03:17):
come on the real estate market. And in nineteen oh
nine they sold their Sears motor buggy to park out front.
Then there were the odd items you could buy. Sears
offered not only asbestos based siding, roof coatings and tiles
for your home, but also cooking tools. Asbestos lined and
coated omelet pans, stove lining, stove mats, and toasters were

(03:40):
all featured in a nineteen oh two catalog, long before
we realized how deadly that stuff is. Other strange catalog
items included some quack medicine gadgets, like the Heidelberg electric
belt with what they called sack suspensary that claimed to
restore a man's virility. The catalog ad targeting those delicate

(04:01):
nerves and fibers eighteen dollars will bring you health, vigor, manliness,
and happiness a bigger measure for your money. And there
were potions like Brown's Vegetable Cure for female weakness, whatever
the heck that means. It claims to treat depression, lack
of ambition, and feebleness of will, as well as the
dread of impending evil. It was also said to benefit complexion,

(04:25):
nerves and overall beauty by acting as a blood maker.
And there was Rosa's arsenic complexion wafers for those with
what they called repulsive skin. Thanks a lot, and you
could get doctor Hammond's nerve and brain pills to cure
low spirits as well as rumbling in the bowels. Perhaps
oddest of all, at least to our sensibilities, was a

(04:46):
heroine kit. You see, in the late eighteen hundreds there
were a lot of elderly Civil War veterans who had
been injured and gotten hooked on morphine. The drug company
Bear had a brand new red hot solution to that.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Heroin.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
I claimed it was stronger but less addictive than morphine
and would also give relief from asthma and other breathing problems.
You could buy a kit containing two vials of heroin,
a syringe and two needles, and a heroin kit carrying
case for a mere buck fifty. If all else failed,
you could even turn to the Sears catalog to buy tombstones.

(05:21):
You could either have a pre written or customized epitaph,
and for a little over twelve bucks you could get
a sleeping angel stone, or there was the mother and
father side by side stone for about twenty dollars, or
for a big shot, one hundred and fifteen dollars would
get you the dark bar granite sarcophagus. The huge Sears
catalog was so ubiquitous. Folks even used its thin pages

(05:44):
for toilet paper when they ran out, or stuffed it
into walls as insulation, probably in a Sears kit house.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Try doing that with Amazon.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Hope you liked the Backstory with Patty's Steel Please leave
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free to dm me if you have a story you'd
like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and
on Instagram Real Patty Steele.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
I'm Patty Steele.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
The back Stories a production of iHeartMedia, Premier Networks, the
Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free
to reach out to me with comments and even story
suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook
at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with
Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't know you
needed to know