On Saturday, November 15, ten catalogs landed in my mailbox. That’s a lot of catalogs. Some of them are catalogues, which are a lot like catalogs only snootier. Here’s the lineup: The Smithsonian Catalogue, Winter Silks, Hammacher Schlemmer, National Geographic, Wine Country Gift Baskets, Harry and David, Frontgate (which gets this years’ special raspberry award),Wolferman’s, PBS and Domestications.

Frontgate’s raspberry is for a callout from a photo of a trash compacter which has a special “junk mail” separator. Bite me.

I’d never heard of Wolferman’s. They sell breakfast stuff: bagels, muffins, bread, jam, coffee, etc. Their slogan is “Because Everything Starts With Breakfast.” I’d drop the Because.

All the catalogs invite response by mail, online, phone and fax. One offers email response after downloading an Excel sheet which sounds ’way too complicated for me.

An interesting trend is that most of these catalogs have on page order forms, on glossy stock which is hard to write on without smearing, and they make you find your envelope. The two with bound- in order forms and formed envelopes make you find your own stamp. Looks like the general idea is to discourage mailed-in responses. I suspect that adding an envelope with prepaid postage would increase overall response and, at the prices charged in these catalogs, it’d be a cheap way to generate a lift.

They all have negative guarantees which amazes me. A negative guarantee says something like “not satisfied” or “if it ever fails”. A positive guarantee is phrased slightly differently, “You must be delighted or simply return …” Domestications doesn’t even call its guarantee a Guarantee; it’s a “Return Policy”.

A few catalogs have little letters boxed on the inside front cover. One of them, Hammacher’s, is about the guarantee and it’s really strange. They offer to take back whatever you don’t like but say nothing about returning your money.

What am I going to buy from any of these catalogs? Hammacher has a nifty looking item on page 14, a sort of Gameboy for bridge players that my girlfriend might like.