And it inspired competitors β notably Sears Roebuck, which soon became the market leader. (The story goes that the Sears Roebuck catalogue had slightly smaller pages than Montgomery Wardβs β with the intention that a tidy-minded housewife would naturally stack the two with the Sears catalogue on top.)
By the centuryβs end, mail-order companies were bringing in $30 million a year β a billion-dollar business in todayβs terms; in the next twenty years, that figure grew almost twenty-fold. The popularity of mail order helped fuel demands to improve the postal service in the countryside β if you lived in a city, youβd get letters delivered to your door, but rural dwellers had to schlep to their nearest post office.
Excerpt from: The Next Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy by Tim Harford