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In a First, Amazon Begins Mailing 70-page Printed Holiday Toy Catalog To US Homes (cnbc.com)
Amazon is shipping its first-ever printed holiday toy catalog, titled "A Holiday of Play," to millions of customers in the U.S. starting this month, the company said. From a report: "Amazon is excited to offer a new way for customers to shop for toys this holiday season," Amazon said in a statement. The catalog comes with a distinct retro look, invoking memories of old Toys "R" Us catalogs that made the now-defunct toy retailer so successful. Some of the featured toys come with a QR code, allowing readers to instantly scan and shop for more products. Readers can also scan the product images in the catalog with their Amazon App to get more information and add them to their shopping cart. The move is Amazon's latest in following the playbook of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
Perfect timing with the demise of Sears!! Amazon will take over the world!
Paper. It never goes away. That's interesting but I'm not sure what to make of it. Angry people will say it is an abomination and needs to go away by force. But tactile input media seems important. On the otherhande I used to never think a kindle could replace a paperback. Now I prefer the kindle.
What I do miss however is that it screws up my photograpic recall. I recall facts and images in equations in text books in part, by where they are on the page. The kindle eradicates that so my recall goes down. I don't care about that for pulp fiction but for text and jouranl articles it matters.
My fingers also remember what pages things were near.
The other nice thing about paper is that grouping effect. You dont' just get what you were looking for but also things you might be interested in that are related.
We'ver lost that with academic search engine. It used to be that half the value of reading a journal was the article after the one you searched for was more important.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
glossy paper makes for a poor fire starter.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Amazon is the new Sears.
It should be illegal to advertise to children
Born in the 70's, I was big into the Star Wars toys and some other toys around that era. My parents let us get some, but never could we get enough. For half of the stuff I couldn't get, I would keep old Sears catalogs to look at the pictures and pine for them. Until my asshole (read: probably completely reasonable and sensible) dad through the old catalogs away... the heartless son of a bitch!
Well with the www, we will always have access to old picts of old toys, so I doubt any kids are going to drool over these catalogs. Or will they?
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Man I hated flipping through those as a kid to get to the toy section. Until one day I didn't.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
One interesting conceit Amazon had to make for this to work with their ever-shifting pricing model is there are no prices in the catalog. You have to go online to see the current price.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Well, they did start off by being a book store.. and they still are.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Yes, kids these days have tablets and all that, but the tablet is distracting, the kid could be gaming instead of watching the catalog and drooling over the toys, which is the whole point.
So, that's why the catalog is for toys, and toys alone, not some sort of "best of amazon" catalog.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
What is this barcode abomination I Hear about? Cues is the way to go for the full retro feeling.
That would have been a wonderfull excuse to get my 5 :cuecats out of storage and party like it is 2000 all over again!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
this is not targeted at parents but at children who don't have access to their parents amazon accounts to browse for themselves. It's so little Suzy will say, "daddy, daddy, I want this dolly rocket house, and this stuffed animal, and this...." Now not only are ads everywhere on the web, but your children are now effectively turned into yet another ads. /s Thanks Amazon /s
the Sears Wishbook is how I told everyone what I wanted for Christmas. That toy section was just about worn out from all the flipping through the pages I did. When you got something for Christmas from Sears it was usually obvious too - my Masters of the Universe toys came in cardboard box two-packs instead of the standard single item blister packs, and things that usually came in boxes usually came in plain brown cardboard boxes with monochrome print on the outside instead of the fully color shelf print.
Of what Amazon does that I disapprove of, bringing back a real toy catalog might be one of those things they do that I can get along with. Sure, it probably wont have the heft of the Wishbook, but there were other, supplemental small catalogs too....
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Shockingly, the phone book is still thrown on my doorstep at least once a year too. From there it goes right into the recycling can, never even making it inside.
Can we make both of them go away?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I STILL think Sears could eat Amazon's lunch, but I know it won't happen; they will continue to evaporate to nothing.
Amazon's website is awful, one of the worst. And purchasing something from it often means taking a gamble dealing with someone who is halfway around the world and only wants your money - he is not interested in building his store's brand nor product quality. Browsing on that website is often arduous, "What I wouldn't give to walk around some aisles to touch/find what I want..." I catch myself thinking.
My elderly neighbor of 30 years just passed away, and I learned that her ~60 year old house is a Sears Roebuck house! To the younger folks, after being chosen from a Sears catalog, the house's engineering plans and all its materials were delivered to the site, where it was built, and still stands today.
I think there is a great advantage to exploiting both an online presence AND an in-store experience (shelves of product and order pick-up), but being mindful that non-poor people do not want to waste time jacking around with dubious suppliers and their "brands". If Sears "chooses" what they sell and stands behind it, they would be more than barf-on-a-screen.
Trying to kill the Amazon, Amazon?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
those catalogs are expensive but with how much history they have they'll know exactly who to mail it to. And with Sears and Toys-R-Us dead they'll clean up this year. Walmart barely even has toys these days. There's one small isle for boys, one for girls and one for the little kids.
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In a large cardboard box?
It's not a conceit. It's part of their plan to always provide you with the optimal pricing. The optimal pricing that will still induce you to buy the product while maximizing their profit.
Far too many times I have heard of a product I wanted being available on Amazon for some ridiculously low price that made buying it a no brainer, only to find out that when I logged in with my Amazon account to buy it, the price had gone up to the point I was no longer interested.
Yes, and a conceit Amazon had to make when printing a paper catalog was to not put prices in it.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Such as? What titles?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
They're all fine and well until you need to do some repairs or insulate. I have one of those, it's a pain in the neck to re-run electric which is necessary because the original was aluminum wiring as cheap as possible. You have to drill through 3 2x4's because the top of the house and the bottom of the house are separate parts. The whole house is 2x4 even though 2x6 has always been the standard in cold climates and even necessary for the length that they run as.
The Sears houses were cheaply built in the factory, they're not great by any standards, even 1970's.
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Will there be rotary-dialed telephones too, that I can call up, wait on hold for 10 minutes, then read off a 20 digit number, one digit at a time, for each item I want to purchase?
How do I opt out of this bullshit? It's just an annoying waste of paper.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
I hear Lowes offers something similar these days.
I don't want this no one wants this. Why kill billions of trees when you can just view it on-line! Why are they going back to 2000?