Service Merchandise

» see servicemerchandise.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard of service merchandise was years after it had already closed, reading a retail history thread on a long flight. catalog-showroom retail had not reached turkey at any scale i would have noticed. for an american growing up in the seventies or eighties this was a normal saturday afternoon: walk into a big windowless box, browse a paper catalog the size of a phone book, find the item number for a casio watch or a sanyo boombox, hand a clerk a carbon form, then stand near a conveyor belt until your box came rumbling out of a hidden warehouse.

the company started as a five-and-dime in 1934 in pulaski, tennessee, run by harry and mary zimmerman. their son raymond pivoted the format to catalog-showroom retail in 1960, after working for a wholesale jewelry distributor in chicago that ran a similar model. by 1986 service merchandise was doing more than four billion dollars in annual sales across roughly 400 showrooms (it sat in that range).

by the late nineties the showroom format had become a slow-motion museum exhibit. walmart could undercut the price floor and best buy could outsell on electronics with stores three times bigger. the conveyor-belt theater was no longer a feature anyone wanted to wait around for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the showroom worked like this. you walked in past pegboard demo units of the most popular items. the rest of the inventory was hidden in a warehouse behind a wall. you wrote down the item numbers and handed the slip to a cashier with cash or a check. a few minutes later a clerk pushed your boxes onto a chrome conveyor belt at the front of the store. retail as a magic-trick demo, anyway. fewer impulse buys for the customer, lower theft rates and smaller showroom footprints for the operator.

service merchandise was the largest of these catalog-showroom chains in the us. it sat in the same retail category as best products and consumers distributing, both of which died earlier in the nineties. the inventory was jewelry, small electronics, kitchenware, sporting goods. enough to anchor a strip mall but not deep enough to fight a real superstore.

~ the cracks ~

by the mid-nineties the format started bleeding. walmart and target both built out their home goods aisles. circuit city and best buy took over consumer electronics with stores three times bigger. the per-square-foot economics of hiding inventory behind a wall stopped making sense once warehouse clubs proved customers were happy to push a flatbed cart through twelve aisles of pallet racks.

the company filed chapter 11 on march 15 1999, closed about a third of its stores during reorganization, and tried to relaunch as a jewelry-and-housewares chain. it never quite worked. the post-9/11 holiday season finished the job. on january 8 2002 the board voted to liquidate the remaining 216 showrooms. final closures wrapped by march 27. the brand limped along briefly as an online-only operation until 2004, then shut down for good.

~ what got buried with it ~

the catalog-showroom model itself. ikea inherited the spirit of the warehouse-pickup experience for furniture, sort of, but the carbon-paper-form-and-conveyor-belt ritual that defined service merchandise has no real successor. amazon absorbed the catalog half of the experience and costco absorbed the warehouse-pickup half. nobody preserved the chrome rail where you stood listening for your number to come up.

also buried, in fairness, was the wedding-gift registry as a non-software product. service merchandise was for decades one of the largest bridal-registry retailers in the us. you walked in with a wedding-registry receipt, scanned a list of pre-selected items, and the conveyor belt did the rest. macy's and target absorbed that function later, and the dedicated registry kiosk faded out of the mall floorplan.

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