Editor’s Take: On the Great Postal Disaster of 2007

On the half-full side: Can anything positive come out of this? I’m dating myself, but in the late 1980s, the catalog business, by and large, had become fat and bloated. There were numerous redundant titles out there (remember The Sporting Edge? Inmac?), and many were either just getting by their break-even points or losing money. Then, following the huge postage increases of ’88 and ’91, the industry suffered some rough times. In particular, the undercapitalized, poorly managed catalogers either went out of business or were absorbed by healthier companies that only were interested in their lists.