In a First, Amazon Begins Mailing 70-page Printed Holiday Toy Catalog To US Homes (cnbc.com) 108
Amazon is shipping its first-ever printed holiday toy catalog, titled "A Holiday of Play," to millions of customers in the U.S. starting this month, the company said. From a report: "Amazon is excited to offer a new way for customers to shop for toys this holiday season," Amazon said in a statement. The catalog comes with a distinct retro look, invoking memories of old Toys "R" Us catalogs that made the now-defunct toy retailer so successful. Some of the featured toys come with a QR code, allowing readers to instantly scan and shop for more products. Readers can also scan the product images in the catalog with their Amazon App to get more information and add them to their shopping cart. The move is Amazon's latest in following the playbook of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
Perfect timing with the demise of Sears (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Perfect timing with the demise of Sears (Score:3)
It's not Amazon's fault the industry is so inefficient. Wages are padded through bonding and other insurances, which give the consumer piece of mind, but drives up the cost of labor by limiting the labor pool. Amazon is essentially replacing the bonding and insurance, thus driving down costs to where they should be.
Fixing shit around the house is something every man in the 50s was just expected to do. It doesn't deserve anything more than $10/hr.
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It's not Amazon's fault the industry is so inefficient. Wages are padded through bonding and other insurances, which give the consumer piece of mind, but drives up the cost of labor by limiting the labor pool. Amazon is essentially replacing the bonding and insurance, thus driving down costs to where they should be.
Fixing shit around the house is something every man in the 50s was just expected to do. It doesn't deserve anything more than $10/hr.
You must be fun at parties. Some companies (usually the large ones) charge astronomical prices for home improvement projects, but if you're wanting to pay $10 an hour for a window or siding installer you are going to get exactly what you pay for.
I have a small business and I pay my concrete finishers $18 an hour, and I have a hard time finding good people even at that rate.
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I still remember being a little kid in the late 60s/early 70s and thumbing through Sears's "Wish LIst" catalog a few weeks prior to Christmas, the toy section was always in the back. It was one of the most gleefully anticipated traditions of the season.
I'm not sure what Amazon's angle is here though, kids would probably be just as happy surfing their website, but I guess it'd be nostalgic for older parents..?
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Re: Perfect timing with the demise of Sears (Score:2)
I was thinking toyr us but sears works too.
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Bringing multi-colored toilet paper back to bathrooms everywhere!
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Perfect timing with the demise of Sears!! Amazon will take over the world!
Feels a bit more like Amazon is dancing on Sears' grave. If anyone was primed to establish and dominate the online delivery industry, it was Sears. It was a real missed opportunity and something that will likely be decomposed and discussed in business schools for decades. (hindsight being 20/20 and all). We kind of knew it was too late for Sears once Kmart bought/merged it.
Why didn't they mail a USB stick (Score:4, Insightful)
Paper. It never goes away. That's interesting but I'm not sure what to make of it. Angry people will say it is an abomination and needs to go away by force. But tactile input media seems important. On the otherhande I used to never think a kindle could replace a paperback. Now I prefer the kindle.
What I do miss however is that it screws up my photograpic recall. I recall facts and images in equations in text books in part, by where they are on the page. The kindle eradicates that so my recall goes down. I don't care about that for pulp fiction but for text and jouranl articles it matters.
My fingers also remember what pages things were near.
The other nice thing about paper is that grouping effect. You dont' just get what you were looking for but also things you might be interested in that are related.
We'ver lost that with academic search engine. It used to be that half the value of reading a journal was the article after the one you searched for was more important.
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It used to be that half the value of reading a journal was the article after the one you searched for was more important.
You get that in toy, DYI and parts catalogs as well. Browsing in a paper catalog is still that much better.
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Everyone the age of 35 and under is going to summarily take this catalog and throw it in the recycling bin. What a waste.
Hope they don't use glossy paper... (Score:4, Funny)
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When my father was a kid in the 1940s, his farm family used Sears catalogs in the outhouse for toilet paper. Yes, they hated the glossy pages too!
So Amazon is the new Sears? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Your comment is so understated. They already have the distribution network around the country. All they needed was a working online catalog. Now Amazon is recreating it, without the local distributors.
Sad.
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without the local distributors.
They ARE building local distributors!
Actually, Amazon IS making local distributors. They bought whole foods, and they are building retail stores. They have one in Seattle and at least one in New York.
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They should have just bought sears.
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Only if the women's underwear section is included. That section was indispensable for those of us living in "no porn" homes as pre-Internet kids. (I preferred the more risque JCPenney's underwear section over Sears's more conservative selection, but you'd take what you could get.)
Even Manchildren (Score:1)
It should be illegal to advertise to children
The Toys I didn't get from Sears (Score:2)
Born in the 70's, I was big into the Star Wars toys and some other toys around that era. My parents let us get some, but never could we get enough. For half of the stuff I couldn't get, I would keep old Sears catalogs to look at the pictures and pine for them. Until my asshole (read: probably completely reasonable and sensible) dad through the old catalogs away... the heartless son of a bitch!
Well with the www, we will always have access to old picts of old toys, so I doubt any kids are going to drool over
Re:just the toys ? (Score:4)
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I don't think it would be great for everything but this particular case it seems like a great idea. With department stores basically dead, and Toys 'R' Us gone (for now) it's really down to
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Well with the www, we will always have access to old picts of old toys, so I doubt any kids are going to drool over these catalogs. Or will they?
They won't, because you had to have actually been there as a kid before video games to understand just how cool the Enterprise Bridge and Space:1999 Eagle playsets really were, along with all the Evel Knievel and SSP toys. You also had to have been there to understand the depth of envy you felt when your friend got one and you didn't.
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Well, they did start off by being a book store.. and they still are.
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Shockingly, the phone book is still thrown on my doorstep at least once a year too. From there it goes right into the recycling can, never even making it inside.
Can we make both of them go away?
Does it have... (Score:2)
Dolls for Grownups? #AskingForAFriend
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Terminology (Score:1)
No prices (Score:2)
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It's not a conceit. It's part of their plan to always provide you with the optimal pricing. The optimal pricing that will still induce you to buy the product while maximizing their profit.
Far too many times I have heard of a product I wanted being available on Amazon for some ridiculously low price that made buying it a no brainer, only to find out that when I logged in with my Amazon account to buy it, the price had gone up to the point I was no longer interested.
Yes, and a conceit Amazon had to make when printing a paper catalog was to not put prices in it.
The catalog is geared towards kids, not parents (Score:2)
Yes, kids these days have tablets and all that, but the tablet is distracting, the kid could be gaming instead of watching the catalog and drooling over the toys, which is the whole point.
So, that's why the catalog is for toys, and toys alone, not some sort of "best of amazon" catalog.
not a cue barcode? (Score:3)
What is this barcode abomination I Hear about? Cues is the way to go for the full retro feeling.
That would have been a wonderfull excuse to get my 5 :cuecats out of storage and party like it is 2000 all over again!
As a parent (Score:2)
Having grown up in a shit-hole town in the desert, (Score:2)
the Sears Wishbook is how I told everyone what I wanted for Christmas. That toy section was just about worn out from all the flipping through the pages I did. When you got something for Christmas from Sears it was usually obvious too - my Masters of the Universe toys came in cardboard box two-packs instead of the standard single item blister packs, and things that usually came in boxes usually came in plain brown cardboard boxes with monochrome print on the outside instead of the fully color shelf print.
O
Coulda Been Sears (Score:2)
Amazon's website is awful, one of the worst. And purchasing something from it often means taking a gamble dealing with someone who is halfway around the world and only wants your money - he is not interested in building his store's brand nor product quality. Browsing on that website is often arduous, "What I wouldn't give to walk around some aisles to touch/find what I want..." I catch m
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According to the WSJ, Amazon isn't making big bucks shifting merchandise. Their money these days is coming from The Cloud (dum, da da, dum). Amazon is getting too big for any one company to knock off because they'd essentially need to be another Amazon. As soon as any company started getting traction, Amazon would just buy them out or undercut them or get them regulated to death. The only way for Amazon to die is for business sentiment to shift to Not Cloud (good luck selling the MBAoids on that one) and co
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My elderly neighbor of 30 years just passed away, and I learned that her ~60 year old house is a Sears Roebuck house! To the younger folks, after being chosen from a Sears catalog, the house's engineering plans and all its materials were delivered to the site, where it was built, and still stands today.
You could buy a *house* through Sears? Holy crap!
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They're all fine and well until you need to do some repairs or insulate. I have one of those, it's a pain in the neck to re-run electric which is necessary because the original was aluminum wiring as cheap as possible. You have to drill through 3 2x4's because the top of the house and the bottom of the house are separate parts. The whole house is 2x4 even though 2x6 has always been the standard in cold climates and even necessary for the length that they run as.
The Sears houses were cheaply built in the fac
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Re:Coulda Been Sears (Score:4, Informative)
I STILL think Sears could eat Amazon's lunch, but I know it won't happen; they will continue to evaporate to nothing.
Sorry but you're a little behind on current events. Sears could have eaten Amazon's lunch 15 years ago but they're in bankruptcy proceedings. And not the reorganization kind but the 'sell everything off and liquidate because we give up' kind.
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And purchasing something from it often means taking a gamble dealing with someone who is halfway around the world and only wants your money - he is not interested in building his store's brand nor product quality.
To some extent, that is true, but the reviews mean that a lot of seller in fact do care a great deal about product quality, and making you happy. If they get bad reviews on Amazon, they're not going to sell very much. Unless it's some sort of really niche product, people will tend to buy a similar product that has better reviews.
My wife reviews almost everything she buys on Amazon, and as a result she gets contacted by various sellers who offer to reimburse her for the cost of their products if she writes
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She once wrote a bad review of a product that she bought herself and the seller contacted her and offered to refund her if she removed the bad review, but she declined.
I wonder how many decline in order to leave the bad review right where it belongs.
Really? PAPER? (Score:2)
Trying to kill the Amazon, Amazon?
Big Data (Score:2)
Will it arrive (Score:2)
In a large cardboard box?
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WTF Kill Billions of Trees! (Score:1)