OK, the company is Montgomery Ward and the year is 1985 but otherwise this sounds like something you’d read today
Montgomery Ward was closing stores because of a new technology. No, not AI, but rather something called the 800#.
And it changed life for people here in Cambridge.
In the 1960s and 70s every family kept a 3-minute egg timer next to the phone. Long distance calls were expensive, even more so during the day. People regularly waited until after 5pm to place long distance calls. They turned over the egg timer to be sure not to exceed 3 minutes thus avoiding extra charges.
Silly? Maybe so, but keep in mind it was a long-distance call from Eagle Bridge to Cambridge.
So, how did Cambridge do “online shopping” in the 1960s? And how was the 800# technology going to revolutionize that
In the 1960s, companies mailed us 100+ page hard-cover catalogues in the Spring and Fall. We’d make our selections. Then we’d visit Harold and Shirley Andrews at their Montgomery Ward Catalog Store. We’d tell them what we wanted. They’d write it down and we’d go home. In about a week or two, they would call us to let us know we could stop in to pick up our order … and pay … with these pieces of green paper we called “cash” ;- )
In 1964 the Andrews opened a Montgomery Ward catalog store in the Hitchcock building between Jack Weller’s restaurant and Jimmy Legry’s drug store. In 1973 the store moved to Mountainside Drive, now the White Creek Town Hall across from CCS.
As noted in the attached article, by 1985 the Andrews were the longest operating sales agent for Ward in the United States.
But that longevity couldn’t stop the wave of new technology. The 800# was allowing people all over the country to make long-distance calls for free (well, paid for by the callee, not the caller). So companies were creating a new division named “call centers”.
You no longer got to talk to Harold or Shirley. You had to talk to a “foreigner”, maybe even someone who didn’t live in your state. You had to get used to strange Southern accents on the other end of the telephone call. You had to hope the person on the other end of the long-distance call wrote down the correct product number. And that they wrote down NEW YORK and not MASSACHUSETTS when you said Cambridge.
Oh how we missed the days of standing across the counter, talking to the Andrews, pointing at the picture in the catalog, watching them write down the product number. We never considered the possibility that our order would be written in error or that it would be delivered to another state.
We were told that the 800# technology was going to make our lives better … and we’d get our products delivered sooner. Of course, the new technology meant the post office was going to be getting lots and lots of packages. Our post office mailboxes were small so the post office had to build space to hold the packages until we picked them up. No more could the post office rely on Harold or Shirley walking to the post office to pick up packages in a timely fashion. And the rural mail carriers needed bigger vehicles to accommodate the larger number of packages.
And the people we talked to on these 800#’s, when it got time to pay for the order, they asked for something called a “credit card”?? People all over Cambridge we’re going “huh”. Then we found out we could mail a check. So we had to paid postage and hope that when the check was received at the other end it would be applied to our order.
But, hey, it’s technology, and we all know that means our lives are going to be better (er, different).