“Aren’t you sick of all the catalogs in the mail?” asked my friend Kelly over lunch the other day. “Not in the least,” I said, in my deservedly authoritative manner. Catalogs are one of the shrinking number of commercial successes America has to brag about.
Our catalog industry is growing faster than sumacs over septic tanks. Retail stores are slogging along at a compound annual growth rate of about 4.5 percent, but catalog sales are growing at a healthy 6.7 percent. Because sellers are finding it harder to reach you over the telephone thanks to the Uninterrupted Dinner Movement and the subsequent do-not-call laws, and because sellers can’t just send you random e-mail because of similar consumer whining that led to the restrictions of CAN Spam In-Box Relief Act, they have little choice but to reach you through your mailbox. In that way, these direct marketers, whom you derisively call “junk mailers,” have had to shift from “male enhancement” to “mail enhancement.” And enhance they do.
Americans will receive a record number of catalogs this year – almost 18 billion. By my careful estimate, I alone have received 6,000 catalogs since mid-October. This is because I am “direct-mail responsive,” meaning that I buy stuff from catalogs.
Marketers figure if you buy from one catalog, you will buy from another, so they pass my name along to other catalog companies as if I were the only bottle of ketchup at a French fry eat-off.
There are catalogs, and then there are catalogs. I find myself particularly susceptible to the lure of arcane car stuff, like the Talking Digital Swiss Valve Stem Maintenance Kit. I have ordered special waxes (made without the use of any animals), a monogrammed dipstick and hard-to-find car-molding renewer, which keeps your homeowners association from writing you nasty letters about your dull and faded moldings. (It’s made by the same people who make Grout Doctor.)
One of the great things about catalogs is that they have stuff no one else has. Where else can you find the Touch-On Lighted Toilet Paper Storage Tower or Decorative Sink Strainer/Stoppers that deodorize, too? If someone said to you, “Where can I find an Inflatable Snow Bunker with air pump included to protect my child during snowball fights?” where would you go? Try asking for those at your local hardware.
With all the catalogs I get, I naturally have my favorites. I like the Levenger catalog (“Tools for Serious Readers”). In the Levenger world, we don’t use “pens,” we use “writing instruments,” and we don’t use alarm clocks, we use the Acousticlock, which “combines a night light with the soothing sounds of wind chimes, seashore, brook or birds, plus a bright red ceiling projection clock.” Levenger is big on fountain pens and inkwells, making them look so appealing that I once begged for a fountain pen for Christmas. So inept was I at filling it that I soon looked like a practice body for a tattoo parlor.
One of the new companies mailing me catalogs this year has a lot of high-end pet stuff, including a plush, simulated mink Pet Lounger for your cat or dog. It looks like, um, a widely distended rear portion of a mink, and it has a handle on top. I don’t know cats and dogs all that well, but if I were a cat, it would freak me out to sleep inside something that looked like another animal. I would like a Pet Lounger that looked like a carp.
I order food from catalogs, so you can imagine how the food-catalog cabal has inundated me. One thing I won’t buy is cheese, because a friend who once worked for one of those places that sells the cheese-and-sausage gift baskets told me that the cheese was made from petroleum distillates in 1980 and is put in the packages with devices that look like caulking guns.
One thing I am thinking of ordering is jowls. Burgers’ Smokehouse offers sliced country jowl that “may be fried like bacon, but it’s more flavorful and less expensive.” The only problem is telling someone that what they’re eating is hog cheek, unless that someone happens to be named Billy Bob, Jug or Cletus.
I regret to say that, again this year, I hate the Pottery Barn catalog, because in photos showing rooms with bookcases, all the books are turned with their spines toward the rear. All you can see are pages. Any company that thinks that books are only for decoration probably thinks you buy their leather chairs only for smell. As someone who loves books (see “serious readers” above), this is a sacrilege on a par with puncturing a child’s Inflatable Snow Bunker.
Still, you’ll get no complaint from me about the blizzard of catalogs drifting in my foyer. Denied that avenue, marketers would most likely resort to taping more flyers to my storm door, and that would really stick in my jowl.
Dan Danbom is a Denver freelance writer and amateur crank.
