Sears killed its iconic catalog in 1993 — just before the internet reinvented mail order

For about a century, the Sears, Roebuck catalog — the famous 'big book' and the Christmas 'Wish Book' — was the closest thing America had to an everything store you could order by mail. It sold everything from clothes to tools to kit houses, and it was how Sears built its empire and its direct relationship with American shoppers.

By the early 1990s, the big book had become a money-loser. Printing and mailing thousands of pages was expensive, sales and profits had declined, and in 1992 Sears posted a $3.9 billion loss — then the largest in the history of North American retailing. On January 25, 1993, Sears announced it would close 113 stores, cut 50,000 jobs, and discontinue the general merchandise catalog.

The decision made financial sense on its own terms — but it landed just as a new technology was about to reinvent mail order: the internet. The company that had invented remote shopping, and owned the deepest direct relationship with American consumers, walked away from the category right before it moved online. Sears never built a dominant e-commerce business; it lingered for decades and filed for bankruptcy in 2018, while Amazon — an online catalog of everything — took the crown Sears had invented.