Sears 1993 Annual Catalog

Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you about the days of old.

If you’re in your mid-20s or younger, you probably don’t remember life before the internet. Those of us in our thirties, forties and beyond remember the world of catalogs. Other than the Thanksgiving Day parade, nothing else marked the beginning of the holiday season more than the arrival of 500 bound pages featuring photos of every toy you could imagine. Sears, Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penny, and other large department stores couldn’t wait to get their thick catalogs into the hands of children, who would flip through the pages and create their wish lists from home.

While people have more fond memories of the winter calendars, those same companies also released spring/summer editions, too. They contained few (if any) toys and therefor were much less popular with kids. My dad recently ran across a 1993 Sears Spring/Summer catalog and dropped it off. I’ve had a great time going through it.

Not having held one for a while, I was immediately impressed by the thickness of the book — 1,554 color pages featuring everything from clothing to household appliances. Imagine if someone printed out pictures and wrote descriptions of every single thing Sears sold.

The first thing I flipped to were the computers, which are separated from the electronic typewriters, word processors and fax machines. The catalog flagship machine is the Packard Bell Legend 800 — “The fastest machine we have offered.” It’s a 486 DX2/50 that comes with a 210 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM for $2,099.99. The Legend 730, a 486 SX/20 with a 130 MB hard drive and 2 MB of RAM is half the price at $1099.99. On the following page, there’s an IBM PS/1 computer with a 486 DX/33 processor for $2,699.99. A few other computers are shown. All of them come with 5.25″ floppy drives. If you’re into retro technology like I am, you would be thrilled to find anything this old and still working in your local thrift store. If you’re not, I can put it in perspective; you can buy machines for $5-$10 today that will run circles around these dinosaurs.

For you Mac fans, there’s a Performa 600 with a 160 MB hard drive for $1,899.99, monitor not included. (A monitor is available for an additional $399.99.)

The catalog has 10 times as many portable cassette players as it does CD players. Sony’s CD Walkman starts at $149.99; there’s one with 8x oversampling and “Megabass” for $229.99. The accompanying headphones in the pictures seem old to me. There are no big headphones with flashy colors, nor are there any earbuds.

The video game section starts off with the Nintendo Game Boy and original NES before moving on to the Super Nintendo, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, and the “Sega Super CD” ($299.99), a CD add-on for the Sega Genesis (later renamed the Sega CD).

There’s a $499.99 VCR, a 61″ Magnavox rear-projection television for $2,999.99, and a whole section for TV antennas. Other things haven’t changed as much. The refrigerators and stoves look like refrigerators and stoves, at least to me. To someone else they might seem as outdated as the computers do to me. The ceiling fans, desks, and tools all look like the ones in my home. Based on the pictures, I don’t believe we’ve had any breakthroughs in tent design over the past twenty years.

While there are four pages worth of cordless phones, there are no cell phones or mobile phones. There are no DVD players, no GPS units, and no MP3 players. Beanie Babies wouldn’t debut for a few more months.

The most telling omission is any reference to the internet. There’s no mention of a dot com, no suggestion for customers to visit Sears’s website. Instead, a 1-800 number is listed for customers to call for local inventory. Over the next few years, the world would move online and by 1998, these catalogs would be a thing of the past.

These lovely ladies never saw it coming.