Wishing and shopping

I was in the process of searching online for some summer golf apparel, when I paused to ponder all the changes that have occurred in the ways I have browsed and purchased goods during the span of my life. Is there any segment of our lives that has seen more transformations?

For many years, there were only three basic merchandising methods available to people who lived in our area. The first venues were local stores. Nevada had several thriving business districts, highlighted by all the available shops located on and around the Town Square.

I love to look at the pictures of these various buildings from a time before I was born. The Nevada Square was a thriving shopping area long before it welcomed automobiles. Can you imagine the sights and smells that accompanied the multitude of horses used for both personal riding and the pulling of wagons?

As I stated in an article a couple of weeks back, you could buy almost anything on the Square back then. Sadly, that thriving shopping district now shares a mere pittance of our town's business.

I have heard the question bandied about often over the years, "do you think the Square can ever come back like it used to be?" I hope I am wrong, but, truthfully, I doubt it.

The second major available shopping venue for people from our area has always been to visit the larger cities of Kansas City and Joplin. Highway 71 and the railroads offered reasonable access to both. Big department stores located in the inner city areas were later replaced with huge shopping centers, arranged along easy interstate access.

The third method of obtaining goods for many years, was through the famous "wishing books." These were the catalogs of the two most famous mail order businesses in American history, Montgomery Wards, and Sears and Roebuck.

Montgomery Wards mailed their first large catalog in 1872. Sears and Roebuck put out a few specialty catalogs; then they published their first large one in 1893. For several decades afterwards, the catalogs of these two giants of merchandising, provided Americans with every imaginable product.

There were few items you could wish for, that were not pictured in these catalogs. One that always amazed me was their offering of factory built homes. You could literally order a pre-fabricated house, and have it delivered to you.

All three of these types of shopping businesses co-existed for decades. Shopping on the Square was the first to lose the battle for the consumer dollar.

With better vehicles and four-lane highways, people seemed to prefer purchasing more of their goods at the new large shopping malls that were springing up all over the country. Bannister Mall in Grandview was barely more than an hour from Nevada.

It offered a variety of shopping and other activities. There were good restaurants, and it was not uncommon for a family to make their visit an all day affair, just as their parents had done at the Square of old.

The final nail in the coffin of the Square was the advent of the superstores like Wal-Mart. It doesn't matter whether you are a fan of that business or not, it is easy to see why shoppers were attracted there. Prices were cheaper, and patrons could find almost anything they needed under one roof.

If there was a drawback, it was that local businesses were unable to compete in price with the superstores. That is not really a fair argument, because those same stores were able to survive when Wards and Sears were their competitors, offering lower prices on most items.

In the news recently we are being told, that the shopping mall industry has fallen on hard times. They are closing huge malls all over the country, and most of them are becoming "ghostlike" edifices, just like Bannister Mall did about 20 years ago.

Experts lay the cause of these failures upon two enemies, one old and one new. The first is still the superstores like Wal-Mart. The second is the ever increasingly popular online shopping!

People in Nevada can use their PC or their phones, to browse the Internet shopping sites for anything, and I do mean anything. The delivery trucks of the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, are very convenient for deliveries.

Internet shopping also offers reduced cost to the consumer, due to a couple of factors. First, they can warehouse large supplies just as Sears and Wards once did, to enable lower consumer costs.

The other advantage they have, is a current immunity from paying state sales taxes. When you can offer prices at 5-10 percent cheaper without tax, that is a huge boon for their sales.

On that note, I will add my thought, that the sales tax loophole will likely be eliminated in the future. Our state and local governments are loosing a lot of revenue, and they are not going to take that much longer.

So here we are in the second decade of the 21st century. Shopping on our Square, large mail order houses like Sears and Wards, and those sprawling shopping malls like Bannister, have all begun their demise, or they are already gone.

I always tell people that the stories and lessons of history are simple, the more things change the more they remain the same. I will not attempt to guess what the next new shopping venue or wish books will be, but I am quite certain that there is something else coming.

I miss the old ways of shopping. It was great to walk around our Square and window shop. Oh, and how many times did I flip through the nearly thousand pages in catalogs? Oops, I'm sorry, Amazon has just had UPS ring my doorbell for a delivery. Sorry, I'll finish this later!