Why your favorite catalogs are smaller this holiday season

abcnews.go.com:

While retailers hope to go big this holiday season, customers may notice that the catalogs arriving in their mailboxes are smaller

PORTLAND, Maine — Honey, they shrunk the catalogs.

While retailers hope to go big this holiday season, customers may notice that the printed gift guides arriving in their mailboxes are smaller.

Many of the millions of catalogs getting sent to U.S. homes were indeed scaled down to save on postage and paper, resulting in pint-sized editions. Lands’ End, Duluth Trading Company and Hammacher Schlemmer are among gift purveyors using smaller editions. Some retailers are saving even more money with postcards.

Lisa Ayoob, a tech-savvy, online shopper in Portland, Maine, was surprised by the size of a recent catalog she received from outdoor apparel company Carbon2Cobalt.

“It almost felt like it was a pamphlet compared to a catalog,” she said.

Catalogs have undergone a steady recalibration over the years in response to technological changes and consumer behavior. The thick, heavy Sears and J.C. Penney catalogs that brought store displays to American living rooms slimmed down and gave way to targeted mailings once websites could do the same thing. Recent postal rate increases accelerated the latest shift to compact formats.

The number of catalogs mailed each year dropped about 40% between 2006 to 2018, when an estimated 11.5 billion were mailed to homes, according to the trade group formerly known as the American Catalog Mailers Association. In a sign of the times, the group based in Washington rebranded itself in May as the American Commerce Marketing Association, reflecting a broadened focus.

But don't expect catalogs to go the way of dinosaurs yet. Defying predictions of doom, they have managed