The Paper Catalog the Internet Couldn’t Kill: McMaster-Car

Subscribe to the channel if you love watching the little guy WIN:    / @gritandmortar   In 1919, the Chicago Tribune reported that Henry Channon had fired his own two sons for “bringing in no business.” The supply company those two sons bought was McMaster-Carr. More than a hundred years later, its thick yellow catalog is still coming. Montgomery Ward mailed America’s first mail-order catalog. It stopped in 1985, and the company closed for good in 2001. JCPenney printed its last Big Book in 2009. The Thomas Register’s big green books went out of print in 2006. So how did a factory parts catalog from Chicago keep growing, from 506 pages in 1908 to thousands of pages today? In this video: Two sons, fired by their father, and the company they bought The two engineers who started it in 1901, and its first 506-page catalog Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett, the True Value warehouse on the Chicago River Montgomery Ward, the company that started mail order The Thomas Register and the row of green books What happened when the internet and Amazon came for the parts business The honest part: how big McMaster-Carr has become What it did that every name in the graveyard didn’t If you ever pulled that yellow book off a shelf in a machine shop, a maintenance room or a purchasing office, tell me about it in the comments. What part were you looking for? Grit and Mortar tells the stories of American businesses that survived when their whole category died. SOURCES Chicago Tribune, “Channon to Pay $450,000 to Two Sons He ‘Fired’,” July 11, 1919: https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com... McMaster-Carr history (Wikipedia, citing 1901–1908 trade press and copyright records): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMaste... H. Channon Co. Catalogue No. 50, c. 1910: https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.... H. Channon Co. Catalog No. 101, 1930: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record... McMaster-Carr Catalog 79, 1973 (Penn Libraries): https://find.library.upenn.edu/catalo... McMaster-Carr Catalog 113, 2007 (Internet Archive): https://archive.org/details/bwb_W9-CG... Robert O. “Red” Delaney obituary: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obitu... Encyclopedia of Chicago, Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett & Co.: https://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.o... Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Chicago History Museum, Montgomery Ward UPI, J.C. Penney’s Big Book, 2009: https://www.upi.com/Business_News/200... Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility? (2002): http://credibility.stanford.edu/pdf/H... VentureBeat, Amazon launches Amazon Business, sunsets AmazonSupply: https://venturebeat.com/business/amaz... MDM, Is Amazon Business Becoming the No. 1 Industrial Distributor? (2020): https://www.mdm.com/article/operation... MDM 2026 distributor rankings, via Anglera: https://www.anglera.com/blog/playbooks McMaster-Carr Profit Sharing Trust, Form 5500 data (MyPlanIQ): https://www.myplaniq.com/invest/plani... Patch, Elmhurst expansion: https://patch.com/illinois/elmhurst/l... Community Impact, Fort Worth regional HQ and distribution center: https://communityimpact.com/dallas-fo... Adam Savage’s Favorite Tools: McMaster-Carr Catalog! (2020):    • Adam Savage's Favorite Tools: McMaster-Car...