Shopping from home

Home shopping isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s the culmination of an obsession that began in the Victorian era.

In the 1800s companies used increasingly innovative ways to advertise and sell their products to people at home. There had been adverts in newspapers for a long time, but by the 1870s department stores regularly produced catalogues of their goods, making it easy for their middle class customers to peruse and spend at their leisure.

This remained a relatively niche business model, attracting only well-to-do customers who lived near enough to the store to collect their goods or have them delivered. The true revolution began in 1883, when the Royal Mail began to offer its parcel service. Cheap postage for objects large and small made mail order possible on a national scale.

By the 1950s home shopping catalogues like Littlewoods were not just making huge amounts of money, but also formed an important part of the social lives of thousands of Britons. 

Those who had moved out to new and unfamiliar suburbs without high streets after the Second World War found company in catalogue clubs which helped people afford more expensive items like watches and jewellery. Home shopping also offered employment: in 1961 around a million people were wielding catalogues and knocking on doors.

Shopping on credit expanded the industry even further. Those who could not afford to buy a television or a three piece suite from a high street retailer could order it from a catalogue and pay it off monthly, with an inflated interest fee. Easy credit had a devastating impact on many lives, but it proved to be a hugely successful business model.

Littlewoods was initially a football betting company but branched out to mail order catalogues in the 1930s and by the 1980s was the largest private company in Europe.

Today the shopping catalogue has been relegated to the status of an historical relic. Even Argos stopped publishing its iconic bi-annual volume  in 2020. But home shopping is more popular than ever before, thanks to the rise of the internet, and enforced isolation during pandemic lockdowns.

Super-speedy deliveries offered by services like Amazon Prime, make ordering online seductive. Artificial intelligence-powered assistants like Amazon’s Alexa will even take your order for you, and smart fridges will buy another pint of milk for you before you run out.

All these technological breakthroughs mean it has never been easier to fill our homes with stuff, but whether we need it all is another matter entirely.