Online Shopping Circa 1950
I love old photographs. So when a friend pointed me toward a Web site called www.shorpy.com, I quickly became addicted.
A little background: The oddly named site houses a massive online collection of photos from about the Civil War era to the mid-1980s, although the vast majority are pre-1950. If you are truly curious about the name, just go to the very first photo posted and you will find your answer. I had been hoping to come across something on the site that would give me the excuse to write a blog about it for TWICE. So after several days of off and on searching, I finally found a set of photos more or less related to retailing and CE.
The following three images are taken from a Life Magazine series from 1950 that detail the use of how color slides of products were used to show customers what was for sale at a catalog store in Pembroke, Ontario. From what I can understand, the customers would sit in a chair, watch slides and then place their order.
The creator, Laurence Freiman, named it the Vis-O-Matic.
(The top photo shows a very well dressed lady displaying one of the Vis-O-Matic slides. The middle has two customers using the system and the final image shows the ultra-modern Rolodex that connected the products to the slides.)
Vis-O-Matic was kind of a Home Shopping Network without the network, or a pre-historic cousin to Amazon.com.
A Google search did not turn up much on the Vis-O-Matic, but considering that thousands of Vis-O-Matic-based stores did not appear across the United States and Canada since 1950, I think we have to mark this venture off as something that happened a bit before its time.
I still think it’s great that even 59 years ago someone knew, deep down in his heart, that the average North American would rather shop while sitting in a comfortable chair instead of aimlessly wandering around a store.
Candid commented:
Hey, that’s the gertaest! So with ll this brain power AWHFY?
Roberta commented:
You keep it up now, udnertansd? Really good to know.
tbartman68 commented:
Lighten up, Francis……
frankentech commented:
Dude, relax. He was having a little fun. Somebody needs some a cup of egg nog.
Doug Olenick commented:
Yes, I was trying to be cute, and a little funny. It's the holidays, the economy is still pretty rough many people are out of work so I thought a little levity at the expense of a 59-year-old retail technology might lighten the mood a bit. Sorry if you were looking for something more serious.
Confused commented:
You say the google search didn’t turn up much. I think it turned up plenty. For starters, you could read the comments on snorky below the first picture in your post. Then, you could look up Freiman’s on Wikipedia for the history of the retailer. And go on from there.
Your analysis is shallow, perhaps because you’re trying to be cute. I don’t know. In fact, the customer had to leave her home to go to the “air-conditioned booth”. It appears to have been developed to serve tertiary markets in Canada, with the concept being that the color slides and human presenter would be more enticing than a mail order catalog. Delivery was the next day, precluding the need for backstock in the “store”.
Incidentally, your “59 years ago…” statement seems to completely disregard the whole mail-order catalog business, which started just a touch more than 59 years ago and is the structural model for today’s internet retail.
You do realize that, right?
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