Who established the first mail-order business?
The first MAIL-ORDER BUSINESS.
The first MAIL-ORDER BUSINESS was incorporated on 15 September 1871 as the Army & Navy Co-operative Society Ltd, at 117 Victoria Street, London. Established principally at the instigation of Maj. F.B. McCrea, who became its first Managing Director, the ‘Stores’ was founded with the object of supplying goods of the highest quality at the lowest economic price to its members, chiefly officers and NCOs of the Services and their families. The Society issued its first mail-order catalogue in February 1872. The wide range of goods offered in its 112 pages included Gunpowder Tea at 4s 6d per lb; tinned lobster at 8d; hare soup at is 6d a quart; cigarettes is 4d for 25; Virginia Rob Tobacco at 4s 9d per lb; champagne or gin at 28s a dozen bottles; a quill-pen machine from 4s; Blair’s Gout Pills at 2s 3d a box; Areca Nut Tooth Paste at 1s 6d a pot; table croquet; Ladies’ Merino Drawers at 5s 9d a pair; a Ladies’ Cheltenham Costume in Dark or Light Grey, or Brown Tweed at 56s 6d; and an Admiral’s cocked hat for 124s.
As no parcel existed at his time; goods were forwarded within the London area by Carter Paterson’s parcels delivery service at rates 14 lb for 3 d rising to 1 s for 112 lb. Outside London, mail-order customers were asked to ‘particularize the railway or other conveyance on the back of the order’. Orders from India or the colonies might contain might contain such exotic particulars as ‘Cobb & Co’s Stage Coach’ (in Australia and New Zealand), river-steamer or bullock wagon.
Army and Navy mail-order catalogues were generally issued quarterly, the largest being the March 1887 edition, which had 1,954 pages. The 109th and last catalogue was published in 1939. Since that date the Army & Navy Stores had continued to do business as an ordinary department store and it is no longer run as a co-operative society.
The first miscellaneous retail business to be run exclusively by mail order (i.e. unconnected with a shop) was established in a single room at 825 North Clark Street, Chicago by Aaron Montgomery Ward in 1872, the same year that the Army & Navy Co-operative Society issued its first catalogue. The first Montgomery Ward Price list consisted of a single sheet of paper measuring 12 x 8 in. By contrast, the 1904 catalogue, of which over 3 million were sent out, weighed 4 lb.
