Here’s a 1983 Sears Catalog and Honestly the Parenting Choices Hit Different in Hindsight

The fashion pages are the most reliable comedy in the catalog archive, and they are reliable specifically because fashion was doing something genuinely unhinged in the 1970s and 1980s and every person in those pages looks completely confident about it. The plaid bell-bottoms are not an accident. The neon splatter pants are not a mistake. These were chosen items, purchased with real money from a real catalog by real parents who looked at their children and thought: that is what my kid should be wearing. Retro fashion from Sears occupies a specific cultural register where the confidence of the era and the comedy of the retrospective create a gap that is permanently funny. The cowboy hat in the 1970s menswear spread is the most restrained element on the page, and that tells you everything.

The toy pages are where the nostalgia starts to ache a little, which is the inevitable consequence of looking at vintage toy ads with adult eyes. The original Star Wars figures at $7.88. The NES at $89.99. A Pizza Hut toy oven that ran on an actual light bulb because the 1980s were operating under a significantly more permissive relationship with children and heat sources. Classic toys from Sears represent something specific about that era of childhood, which is that toys were physical, tactile, and required your full presence. You could not half-play with a GI Joe Cobra Command set. You were either in or you were staring at a pile of tiny accessories wondering how they all ended up inside the vacuum cleaner. Old Sears toy pages are also, at this point, retirement plans — the complete in-box sets that survived the era are worth enough now to make every parent who donated them in 1994 experience a very specific kind of grief.

The genuinely concerning pages are the ones that require the most distance to find funny, and the distance, we think, is doing important work. The toddler auto-strap that “lets him sit, stand, kneel or sleep” in a moving vehicle is a product that passed every relevant standard of its era, was purchased in large numbers, and reflects a relationship with child car safety that the culture has substantially revised. The No Excuses ad listing ten things almost-teenagers were prohibited from doing is a document about a specific moment in parenting history that required “no 900 numbers” as a category. The swimsuit spread with prices we cannot psychologically process is a reminder that the same items, in the same physical category, now cost amounts that would have read as satire in 1982. The catalog did not know it was making a historical record. It was just trying to sell tube socks.