Thursday, April 27, 2006

One of my favourite Catalog Pages Ever! Mego Style!



Swiped from the Megomuseum Department of Christmas Catalogs, this is one I vividly remember, it's the 1980 Sears Canada Catalog. I remember just drooling over Old Bob and Humanoid from the Mego Black Hole line.

I ended up getting the Humanoid and S.T.A.R figures but didn't see an Old Bob until I was twenty or so. Buck Rogers had to wait until I was much older.

As for the Cryotron carrying case, I never have seen one in person but Mike at Womprat has one on his site. It's a neat knock offish item for your Kenner Star Wars figures.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

What about the Rebenga Job Mang?



Ok when you see swarthy guys in leisure suits like this are you reminded of:

a) Movies that involve drug dealers?
b) porn?
c) That dance pimp from the Pat Benetar "Love is a Battlefield" video?
d) Papa? Is that you?

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

My Shogun Warrior Companion


This really has nothing to do with anything but I found it funny. It took me a half an hour of TV watching to realize that this was sitting across from me, just staring.

My old Mattel Shogun Warrior with some Fisher Price Sesame Street Little People impaled on his horns. It made me realize that I have no clue as to what goes on in my house during the day. I kind of felt sorry for him....

Cool Consumers Distributing Catalog Auction



I noticed this auction today for one of the final Consumers distributing Catalogs, I believe they died in 97 or 98 however. Another cool ass store killed by Wal-Mart's arrival in Canada.

Anyway, the seller of the Catalog added some stuff from Wikipedia and even mentions my beloved Shoprite in his piece about why Consumers failed. Great stuff, see below:

Consumer's Distributing was a catalogue store in Canada that operated from 1957 to 1996. At its peak, it operated 217 stores. The first Consumer's Distributing store was opened in 1957 by Jack Stupp in Toronto. Consumer's Distributing aimed to reduce costs for customers by storing goods in an inexpensive warehouse, instead of displaying them in a costly showroom. Customers made their selections from a catalogue, filled out a slip with product identification, and waited for staff to retrieve the items from the warehouse. The company was taken public in 1969, but later sold to Provigo, a Quebec-based grocery retailer. Hudson's Bay Company, which operates Canadian department stores under the Bay and Zellers names, opened the "Shop-Rite" catalogue chain in competition. It was closed in 1982. Consumers sought bankruptcy protection in 1996 after an aggressive expansion strategy failed to make the company sustainable. Sales had dropped from $1.8 billion in 1988 to $580 million in 1995. Consumers Distributing was plagued by products being frequently out of stock, and by new warehouse format stores that allowed customers to retrieve products themselves. A similar format store in the United States, Service Merchandise, had also failed at nearly the same time. Consumers Distributing was plagued more by the perception of things "always being out of stock" due to the catalogue shopping nature of the store. In a store like Wal-mart, customers seeking a particular product go to the store to shop. With the catalogue concept, the customer selects the item either at home while looking through the company's catalogue, or by a group of catalogues in the front of every store. Once the customer picks out the merchandise that he or she wants, the customer then goes to the counter where the clerk then goes to retrieve it off the warehouse shelves. It was not uncommon for a customer to wait on line only to be told by a clerk that the merchandise was not in stock. Consumers did not have a computerized inventory until the late 1980s, which meant that the company was not able to track what merchandise was in the stores or what merchandise was wanted by customers. When a product is out of stock, or unavailable from the manufacturer, this creates an "out of stock" problem for a catalogue store, which it does not create for a store who displays their in-stock items. When a customer goes to Wal-mart, they see that they have 10 different products in stock. At Consumers, the customer chose one item, which may not have been in stock. They did not see that there were 15 other similar items that are in stock. Consumers initiated several initiatives to dispel this "out of stock" perception including "super stores" that had all of the available, in-stock products on display; and free home delivery or store to store transfer for items that were not in stock. They also implemented a state-of-the-art inventory system that could check the availability of other stores in real time, and also would suggest alternate products at the store which were in stock. Conseumers was one of the first to initiate this "real time" stock check and prepayment of products available at other branches and the main warehouse. Unfortunately, these initiatives, including the superstore expansion, costly free delivery, and costly new inventory management software overextended the company, and due to this and tightening competition with the introduction of large American retail chains, the company overextended itself.

A Million Miles away from my Ipod



It's always weird to go through a catalog and find something you owned. I received this stereo from my Grandfather in 1978, it didn't make a lot of sense to give an eight year old a then expensive stereo but he got one for my older sister and didn't want to make me feel left out i guess.

He could have given me $20 and I would have felt just dandy but he was really into equality.

Still I had a lot of fun listening to Power Records (Hulk and Star Trek) , The Black Hole story book LP and eventually taking my Mego Black Hole Figures and torturing them on it. Oddly enough when my Grandfather died a few years later, he willed me his stereo.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Doesn't this guy look like Joe Flaherty?



I was thumbing through the 1978 Sears Catalog and thought this guy had an uncanny resemblence to SCTV's Joe Flaherty.
Except this guy has really big hair.....

I miss ShopRite



For those not in the know, ShopRite was a Canadian chain of catalog stores. Very little was on display, you had to fill out a little slip and the item came out of the back.

We had a shoprite downtime where i lived and at that time, it was a pretty big deal because it was a pain in the ass to get across town to Woolco.

My fondest memory entailed my 8th birthday and the Kenner Star Wars Tiefighter my mom promised to get me. On my way in the store, I noticed a skid of Mego Comic Action Heroes exploding Bridge Playsets and tried to weasel both. I failed, but that kind of haunted me, so now I've got that playset MIB.

It's near impossible to find old shoprite catalogs, I paid crazy money for a 1981/82 one recently and will share it. If anyone has one from the 70's they'd like to scan, I'll be your friend!

I promise this blog will be more about the catalogs next time and less whining from me.