J.C. Penney kills its Big Book catalog

The J.C. Penney Co. Big Book is dead -- a victim of shoppers' growing reliance on the Internet.

Plano, Texas-based Penney confirmed that its fall/winter 2009 catalog is its last semiannual, telephone-book-size volume.

The Internet has made the 1,000-page shopping venue obsolete, and printing and transportation costs have been rising annually. The move also improves Penney's environmental footprint, reducing its catalog paper use by 30 percent next year.

Smaller, more frequent mailings of specialty catalogs targeting customers' shopping habits make more sense today, said Mike Boylson, Penney's chief marketing officer.

"It became a very ineffective way to communicate to our customers," he said. "It forced us to bring product in too early and locked in pricing. It was an outdated way of shopping and the last big book in America."

Penney has catalogs supporting its large home-goods business, including its private label Cooks kitchen catalog and Rooms Babies Love. Along with several women's and men's apparel catalogs, the company determined that shoppers increasingly use catalogs as "look books" and inspiration for their store and online purchases.

Big Book sales have been on a decline since 2000 as more shoppers turn to the chain's Web site, JCP.com. Penney's online sales hit $1 billion a year in 2006.

"It has an aging customer. Younger customers don't shop the Big Book," Boylson said.

Once 1,500 pages, Penney's Big Book dropped to well below 900 pages a few years ago. Since 2003, Penney has been shrinking its catalog operation, closing fulfillment centers and telemarketing operations.

By 2004, about 40 percent of Penney's catalog shoppers were placing orders on its Web site instead of calling a toll-free number.

Sales peaked in 1999 at about $4 billion. Penney stopped breaking out its catalog and Internet sales a few years ago.

Penney's Big Book circulation topped out at 14 million. It printed 9 million copies of the final volume.

Penney got into the catalog business in 1963.

In 1993, Penney's profit surged on expanding catalog sales as it aggressively pursued Sears Roebuck & Co.'s catalog customers when Sears discontinued its 106-year-old catalog. Sears' catalog, known to generations as the original "big book," went to 14 million households, but it had been losing money for years.

The arrival of a big book from Sears, Penney, Montgomery Ward or Spiegel were big events, especially the fall and winter books because they were studied long and hard to come up with Christmas wish lists.

The catalogs were yearbooks of American life. -- The Dallas Morning News