This was the business model of the catalog showrooms like Best Products, Service Merchandise, Arden and Brendles. Popular in the 1980’s, most declared bankruptcy by the end of the 1990’s."
When I was living in Brooklyn in the 1970s-1980s, we had such stores. It was called "Consumers Distributing" (though the chain originated in Canada). They sold all sorts of items with the exception of food, beverages, and medicine. They sold things like furniture (which you had to assemble at home), jewelery, toys, appliances, etc.
They didn't have a sales floor. They may have on display a small pathetic handful of cheap items on display such as a child's bike or an inflatable chair. But all their items were stocked in the back room.
When you entered their store, they had their sales catalogs on pedestals along with pencils and order forms. You filled out the order form with your name, address, phone number, name and description of item you wanted to purchase, the item number, the page number of the catalog it was on, etc. It was irritatingly time consuming.
Then you dropped off your order form at the counter and waited a long time for a store clerk to pick up your order form, disappear into the back room and bring your item out front for purchase OR many was the time the clerk would inform you they didn't have the item in stock. But they'd order it for you and you'd pick it up in a week or two. More often than not, I didn't want to wait that long for it, so I'd decline and go to a different store minutes away where they'd have it on a shelf on the sales floor and I'd purchase it. I imagine thousands upon thousands of their customers did the very same thing.
I hated Consumers Distributing and I used to wonder how they managed to stay open for sale with such a lousy business model. They didn't. They went bankrupt in 1996.
