Crushalogs IV: The Revenge.

As a continuing social project, I am examining the volume and weight of catalogs I receive in the mail as the Christmas shopping season gins up into high gear. This is the fourth time I have done this. It's not as scientific an examination as I would hope; I have done these on different dates in November, and I have not spaced the years out evenly. 

In a nutshell, or perhaps a mailbox, I have been curious as to whether online advertising is killing the mail catalog business, so I have been looking at whether the sheer weight of catalogs has been decreasing as time goes on. Are they still considered an effective way to reach potential customers? If so, the overall catalog weight should be increasing or staying about the same. If not, it should be dwindling like the number of non-"commemorative edition" publications on the supermarket checkout magazine racks. 

Here are the results from the three previous entries:

Crushalogs I: November 4, 2016 -- Several weeks earlier in November than this year, and I estimated more than 10 pounds to that time; the catalogs seemed to be thicker eight years ago, but I may have exaggerated the total weight. Bad science, me! 

Crushalogs II: November 8, 2019 -- I also did not make either a count or a weight of the catalogs in 2019. I do note that in 2019, as in 2016, there was a giant dump at the beginning of November. This year it seems to have been parsed out over the month. I wonder if that is because Thanksgiving is so late in 2024?

Crushalogs III: November 19, 2022 -- Two years ago I did weigh the catalogs, and got a total of two pounds. Well, I think I can beat that weight this year! 

So let me load the catalogs into a plastic shopping bag, and then use the old luggage scale... And: 

Almost four pounds! So it looks like catalog mailings are up this year, double by weight from '22. It seems like in a lot of areas, smart businesses are pulling back from the new technological approaches and going back to what works. Maybe catalogs really are the way to reach holiday shoppers. After all, TV viewership is down, landline phones are way down, but if you live somewhere, you have a mailbox. It's a lot easier to focus on a few quality selections in a catalog than deal with the firehose of dubious miscellanea from online stores (hello, Amazon). If a company doesn't just chuck a lot of cheap Chinese crap at its clients, its catalog will likely be of higher interest. 

MAI Fulfillment says one of the advantages of mail catalogs is that they offer measurable results for businesses, justifying the large expenses of design, printing, and mailing. It depends on what kind of customers are being targeted, I supposed. 

What will 2025 bring to the catalog business? Oh, who knows. I have no idea what's coming down the road. I'm grumpy enough now. Maybe next year I'll go full Grinch and steal all the catalogs from all the mailboxes in Whoville and use them to build a giant bonfire to scare off the Whos. Not likely, but who can say what the future holds?