Originally published at: When you could buy a Monkey from the Sears mail-order catalog | Boing Boing
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You could also order a monkey through a comic book ad as late as the 1970s.
Sea monkeys couldn’t have been anywhere near as “exciting”.
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I think it’s sad that Sears didn’t survive the switch to online. On paper it seems like they should have been perfectly positioned to do so. Maybe this is fauxstalgia talking, but they seemed less evil than the Amazon we ended up with. I loved going to Sears as a kid, and flipping through the huge catalogues. On our farm, the barn (giant) and windmill (big) were both from Sears.
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I don’t know whether I’m more disappointed or relieved to discover that I can’t buy a monkey on Amazon…
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Now you can’t even bring your own monkey.
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I think you might also remember this gem: Consumers Distributing.
The place was kinda ahead of its time.
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Oh yes! CD has come up before here on BBS and all the Canadians squee with glee (glee squee?) at the mention of it. My fondest memory is that they were the only place you could get (for us) the new Stomper II toy trucks that that had the PTO winch. Saving my allowance for that and getting one is a highlight of my childhood. I also distinctly remember my mom’s annoyance at having to go to the slightly unpleasant Consumers Distributing place to get it. 
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I’ll add a bit of Canadian squee! CD was such a weird little store and I loved it. The catalogue was always a highlight of any given season. So many cool things to look through and the store itself was fun and kind of mysterious when I was young. I grew up quite close to one in south-western Ontario, so it was a pretty regular stop for us.
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At least now I know about my brother’s origins. /s
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Don’t even get me started on Harrod’s.
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Same! I didn’t understand how this weird little dimly-lit (and kinda dirty) storefront somehow had all this magical stuff in it. Then when we finally went in and it was just a counter with laminated copies of the catalogue sitting on it, the mystery only got deeper!
I think we only went in it the one time. For whatever reason, my mom hated the place. However she humoured me on this occasion because I wanted this thing so badly and had saved my own money for it. She was a good mom.
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I really want one of these. I recently bought an extremely overpriced organ.
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New kidney?
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Liver, but thanks for caring.
Wore the old one out.
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Where do you go now if you need a scratch monkey?
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This is too much monkey business for me to be involved in
But seriously, monkeys should never be sold as pets to anyone. I’ve had a chance to see both spider and capuchins in the wild and they cover several miles of forest every day. Sticking them in a cage is horrid
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Monkeys for sale at Sears, you say?
Did they have different levels of quality at different price points: “Good,” “Better,” and “Best?”
Or just “Lady Kenmore?”
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What does “state breed” mean?
This is simply an instruction to the customer to tell Sears which variety of monkey they are ordering. For clothing the catalogue would say things like “state size” and “state color.”
However it does sound rather like Sears is selling an official government-sanctioned monkey breed. Maybe even a Commie monkey: “Comrades! We sell only the STATE BREED!”
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In a way, it does make some sort of business sense. Sears catered to the sort of customers who didn’t live near large cities with a surfeit of specialized stores. This allows rural Kansans the same sort of market access as those persons lucky enough to live near the exotic animal markets of New York City.
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There is a similar story about a kid who mail-ordered a monkey from a comic-book ad. It came in a box and he took into the basement and opened it. The monkey immediately ran all over and was using the pipes in the basement as a jungle gym, so he grabbed the monkey and it turned around and bit his arm bad enough he had to go the E.R. for 28 stiches. But then his parents let him keep the monkey! (In general, they make very bad pets).
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