Sears and company lost

Once upon a time the arrival of a mail order catalog was an exciting day for our family. Each of us would make our selections and mother would carefully fill out the order blank, write a check for the amount due, stuff both in an envelope, add a stamp and one of us would carry it to the mailbox for the rural carrier to pick up the next day and send it off to the big city where the order would be read, filled and mailed back to us.

When the package arrived mother would carefully read the invoice tucked inside the package and check off the contents. She made a point of saving it just in case something might have to be sent back.

The whole system worked just fine, and if you could find the item you needed in all the pages of that very large catalog then you could rest assured if ordered it would arrive and if it was not what you had hoped, it could be returned. Ah! But those were the good old days weren’t they?

The old catalog system is as dead as a dodo, but the number of bright, shiny objects that we might want or need has greatly increased in volume. You name it and you will find just the very thing online. Oh, but this is where the plot thickens.

I hope you are a whole lot less like me and are wary from the start, but I am afraid the early example of seeing a picture of what was necessary or just wanted and then ordering it was too ingrained in my brain. I fell for it.

There was once a commercial that said, “Oh, but I read it on the internet so know it is true.”

It did go on to instruct us that the statement just wasn’t true. On today’s internet places like Facebook, Instagram etc. will show you lovely pictures of items both beautiful, tasteful and/or useful that will be mailed right to your door.

Dear readers, don’t be like me and fall for that bit of snake oil selling. I can guarantee that when the package arrives, if it ever does, there will be no return address, no enclosed invoice or sales slip, no online address and absolutely no way to address a problem with a wrong item, the size, the color, damaged goods etc.

You are stuck. Your money is gone and what you received too many times is not what you wanted.

Amazon is somewhat less conniving, but I promise you the hoops you have to jump through to send an item back are almost not worth the misery of it.

We hear the phrase over and over, “Shop Local”, and in the case of online shopping, it has been my experience that those words are right on the money.

The folks locally will 99% of the time be your neighbor and be willing to help you find and purchase exactly what you need.

Oh, yes, it is very convenient to order from the comfort of your home or from your IPad or phone, but don’t be fooled — you will too many times pay a heavy price for that convenience.

The trusty Sears catalog and those like it are way gone and in its place you will find shysters, scammers, and out and out thieves whose goal is not to serve your needs, but to find their way into your pocketbook or wallet or worse yet, your credit card. Beware!