The Mail-Order Menace: How Catalogs Were Killing Kennewick’s Main Street
A fiery editorial in the 1914 Courier-Reporter warns that buying from Montgomery Ward’s catalog is a betrayal of local commerce, arguing that every dollar sent to Chicago or New York directly causes the death of small-town merchants.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Courier-Reporter, Kennewick, Washington
Article No. 6, by David Powell. Copyrighted.
Commenting on the death of the late Montgomery Ward, the millionaire president of the mail order house which bears his name, the American Fair Trade League says: “Mr. Ward leaves a fortune of $15,000,000 in his own name and a business of $40,000,000 a year, built up at the expense of small towns and villages all over the country, and not a cent of it ever comes back to build up a local community. It is an economic fact that every mail-order purchase by a citizen is a blow at the prosperity of his own community.
“From a sentimental and patriotic standpoint the situation is full of significance. The list of country merchants who every year close their stores and abandon their businesses through inability to cope with the “silent salesmen” of the mail-order concern, is startling when it is considered that no class of citizenship is so essential to our public life, whether the matter be viewed in a social or commercial light. For practically every such failure a good home is disrupted and a sturdy, progressive family is scattered and lost to the community.
President Wilson has spoken on this general line more eloquently than anyone before him. He said: ‘You know what the vitality of America consists of. Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago; it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land---that is the wealth of America, and if America discourages locality, the community, the self contained town, she will kill the nation.’
“Aside from the social phase is the constantly increasing evidence that the consumer, in perhaps a majority, of cases, can trade at home and actually save money on the year’s purchases.”
Any man who is not loyal to his home town and does not stand up for home enterprise and the up-building of home institutions is not loyal to anything or any one when he thinks he can save a few cents. Some men go so far as to believe such a man would disregard his country’s call in time of war and sneak out by hiring a substitute.
There is no excuse for any man sending away from his home town for goods; the merchants in the small towns are able to buy just the same goods as the city merchants, and they will get anything that you require. The same agents sell the big dealers as sell the smaller dealers in the country towns.
When you trade in the cities you are helping to pay the enormous expense of the city dealers. In other words, you are helping pay others’ bills because of a mistaken idea that you cannot buy as cheaply or as well at home.
If you would work for your home town with the home dealers they would also work for you and your interests, the up-building of his home; don’t work against the very people who are your friends and neighbors.
This 1914 panic over mail-order catalogs mirrors today’s anxiety about e-commerce giants like Amazon decimating local brick-and-mortar stores. Just as Kennewick merchants feared the 'silent salesmen' of Chicago, modern small business owners worry about algorithmic pricing and delivery speeds that physical shops cannot match. The editorial’s moralizing tone—linking economic loyalty to patriotism—is strikingly similar to modern 'shop local' campaigns.
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