Huh? That’s not how I remember it at all. You ordered from the catalog and then waited three weeks. If you were going to pick up in the store, why not just go to the store instead of calling an 800 number and reading off your credit card info? There was a whole Seinfeld episode about how the only mail anyone got anymore was catalogs.
Per FRED[1], monthly mail order sales doubled from 1992 to the end of 96.
Obviously it was nothing like today, but mail order was, like, a thing.
*Also, I learned in my google rabbit hole about this that it’s a 1992 Supreme Court decision that confirmed that mail order retailers didn’t have to collect state tax unless they had a physical presence in the state.
You picked up in store because there was free shipping to the sears store in town. You didn't go to the sears store in town because it didn't have very much inventory.
Note that we are talking about small rural towns in the middle of nowhere. When sears started most of the population was either a farmer, or lived in a small town in farm country. If you lived in a large city you could go to a department store downtown and it would have everything. If you lived in a small town the department store had only the very popular items and you were expected to order from them.
By the 1980s the population had shifted to bigger cities, and UPS offered affordable shipping to your door, so those small town stores had little reason to exist and started closing.
Per FRED[1], monthly mail order sales doubled from 1992 to the end of 96.
Obviously it was nothing like today, but mail order was, like, a thing.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MRTSSM4541USS
*Also, I learned in my google rabbit hole about this that it’s a 1992 Supreme Court decision that confirmed that mail order retailers didn’t have to collect state tax unless they had a physical presence in the state.