I don’t know about your mailbox, but in the last three days mine has been stuffed with catalogs.
Everyone from Office Depot to AT&T have felt I needed a paper catalog of their products.
And I admit a deep, dark secret – I love catalog shopping. While I think internet shopping is the bomb, catalogs let you study products, ponder the choices, flip the pages looking for something better.
With a catalog, you can dream a little more about how that outfit would be fabulous (until you realize that lime green really isn’t your color and the only other color they offer it in is magenta).
You can devour the delicious descriptions – and no one does the fantasy description better than Coldwater Creek, in my opinion. Like this one:
It’s a classic American composition. A jean jacket, but with a twist. Because it’s syncopated with coppery stardust so that it literally glows.”
That jacket just oozes elegance, doesn’t it?
I’ve got catalogs from the Hallmark card store, from King Arthur Flour, from HP and Dell, from Kohls and Penneys and Verizon. I’ve gotten an LL Bean catalog for the last three days in a row. I’ve even gotten a catalog from some store downtown that has a “Spend/Save Bank” on the back cover designed to shuttle your money into a “spend” container or a “save” container – and you have no say over which one it goes in! Makes me want to see what other cool things are out for the holiday season.
Or course, once we see something in the catalog we like, we immediately jump online and go check the prices in all our favorite spots like Amazon and eBay, just in case. We dig into the reviews for those big ticket purchases and compare who says what before making a decision.
But the paper catalog is king of them all, sitting on the coffee table until the next one comes along. Until there’s a pile a foot high and you just have to throw them out.
At which time, you’ll wish you had that catalog again!
