The Sears Wish Book, initially known as the Sears, Roebuck Christmas Book, was last published in 2017. According to reports, Sears Wish Book was printed from the years 1933 to 2011 and was once again published in the year 2017.
The Sears Wish Book is a nostalgia associated with Christmas to many Canadians. This feeling of Nostalgia resurfaced this year when Ryan Forbes posted a TikTok video opening a sealed 1996 Sears Wish Book, garnering more than 600,000 views on social media. Ryan Forbes, the man in the TikTok video, came across a 1998 Sears catalog a couple of years ago while cleaning his grandmother's house.
"I don’t know if it was the smell, the feel of the glossy pages, or all the toys I still kind of wanted as an adult, but it was the strongest feeling of nostalgia I had ever experienced — and it was just flipping through a catalog … so I kept it,"Ryan Forbes to People Magazine.
Ryan Forbes then went on to collect Sears catalogs and, as of now, has collected about six of them, People magazine reported. The Sears Wish Book, which he owned and was his favorite of the whole collection, is the one that is featured in his viral TikTok video.
When was the last Sears Wish Book published?
In case you don't know what a Sears Wish Book is, it is a set of catalogs that a department store called Sears used to give to its customers. These Wish Books featured products from every category, from toys to jewelry. It was, in some ways, the offline version of modern-day online shopping sites like Amazon.
Jason Liebeg, who found a website dedicated to vintage catalogs, WishBookWeb, shared with Good Housekeeping his thoughts on Sears Wish Book,
"We take it for granted now, but it was truly world-changing at the time to have so many different products, 600 pages worth, at our fingertips," Jason Liebeg.
According to a Good Housekeeping article, the Wish Book, first produced in 1933, appeared as a "companion" to the Sears company's already existing "Big Book- a semi-annual Catalog." The first Wish Book was 78 pages long, and then as the years went on, the size of the special Christmas catalog increased to 834 pages in 1992. It is also worth mentioning that in 1993, Sears stopped making the general catalog and instead focused on the holiday Wish Book.
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But, soon the Christmas Wish Book began to decrease in size and became mini Wish Books. In 2007, an attempt to resurrect the old Christmas Wish Book was made, but the edition still only had 100 pages, and in 2009, Sears made their Wish Book available on their website. Sears finally stopped the publication of Wish Book in 2011. In 2017 a single edition of the Sears Wish Book was made available in both print and online format.
The downfall of the catalog is speculated to be because of the advent and popularity of online shopping. It is also said that the company's incurring loss due to competition and the subsequent remodeling of marketing strategies are the reasons for Sears's decision to stop the printing of Wish Books.
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