Cool photos but the article initially says "viewed on televisions" when it's clear from later text and photos that the in-store screens had slides being rear-projected onto them and customers would advance manually through slide decks loaded into the projector by staff.
It's fun to see how the media of that era were seduced by the apparent "new technology" when there was really nothing new being done. I also think it's a bit of an over sell for the present-day article to describe this as early e-commerce and conceptually link it to Amazon-like online shopping. At the time this was introduced, the Sears and Roebuck catalog had been the largest retail distribution method in North America for decades.
Especially in rural areas, just about everyone used the S&R and other catalogs to order by mail just about all durable goods they couldn't make themselves (ie not food or other consumables). In that context, this "breakthrough" was hardly novel. In addition to mail-order catalogs, there were also a variety of "catalog stores" where consumers would go to browse and place orders from catalogs which weren't economically feasible to widely distribute. It even appears some of the slides being rear-projected in these photos show photos from printed catalogs of the era. So, instead of browsing a printed catalog and ordering, customers browsed projected slides showing photos of catalog pages and ordered. I'm not seeing any actual improvements on the pre-existing customer experience here. It would kind of be like ordering from Amazon in a 2D browser window in virtual reality goggles and claiming that was new.
It's fun to see how the media of that era were seduced by the apparent "new technology" when there was really nothing new being done. I also think it's a bit of an over sell for the present-day article to describe this as early e-commerce and conceptually link it to Amazon-like online shopping. At the time this was introduced, the Sears and Roebuck catalog had been the largest retail distribution method in North America for decades.
Especially in rural areas, just about everyone used the S&R and other catalogs to order by mail just about all durable goods they couldn't make themselves (ie not food or other consumables). In that context, this "breakthrough" was hardly novel. In addition to mail-order catalogs, there were also a variety of "catalog stores" where consumers would go to browse and place orders from catalogs which weren't economically feasible to widely distribute. It even appears some of the slides being rear-projected in these photos show photos from printed catalogs of the era. So, instead of browsing a printed catalog and ordering, customers browsed projected slides showing photos of catalog pages and ordered. I'm not seeing any actual improvements on the pre-existing customer experience here. It would kind of be like ordering from Amazon in a 2D browser window in virtual reality goggles and claiming that was new.