Shrinking Wishbook another sign of changing retail trends

It was a bit of a surprise to see the Sears Wishbook on the coffee room table the other day, the once weighty tome of glad tidings of the Christmas season has slimmed down significantly this year! Perhaps offering up a glimpse into the changing nature of how we may be approaching the retail trade at holiday time.

While it once could provide more than a few hours of Christmas dreaming and stand in as a dandy door stop should it be required, the 2016 version won't take quite as much time to ramble through from cover to cover and sadly, any door in the house would appear to pass right over its width.

The reduction in the size of the catalogue perhaps is providing us with an indication as to how the nature of the retail trade is changing, with so many new options available through on line shopping, the days of a mass order to the Sears order desk hotline in the weeks leading up to Christmas would seem to be a thing of the past.

Instead, the Wishbook, currently available at the Prince Rupert Sears location at Five Corners, may be joining the offerings of boutique like shopping from Amazon, Chapters and the many other online storefronts that keep the local delivery trucks busy every day of the week on the North Coast.

Times change of course, but with those changing times, so too it seems could be some long standing traditions.

As we spend more and more time scanning the websites of countless North American retailers and adding to cart, the prospect of some excited tugging back and forth of the Wishbook and the composition of a lengthy list for Santa may be one of those traditions that is about to evolve.