How to Celebrate National Mail Order Catalog Day
Visit your nearest airport. Approach a ticketing counter and ask the airline representative for a copy of SkyMall. The representative will inform you that the SkyMall catalog is no longer in print. In fact, SkyMall filed for bankruptcy protection in 2015, only to be purchased by another company and resurrected as an online shopping destination. This new version of SkyMall lacks the whimsy and frivolity of its previous incarnation, stocking neither life-sized yeti statues nor replica swords nor two-person submersible watercraft designed to look like sharks.
Take a quiet moment to mourn the fall of SkyMall, but commend the representative for their comprehensive knowledge of the SkyMall business.
Ask the airline representative for the cheapest ticket to anywhere, as long as it’s departing today. Your old life – the life in which a physical SkyMall catalog existed – is over. It’s time to start anew.
Links & Learning
- How SkyMall Captured a Moment of Technological and American History – Smithsonian
- SkyMall: The Strange Story of America’s Most Delightfully Weird Catalogue – The Atlantic
- SkyMall Goes Bankrupt – A Poem to Commemorate the Airplane Catalog – People
- SkyMall’s Bankruptcy Had Less to Do With Its Absurd Catalog Than You Think – Los Angeles Times
Picture Time
A few of our favorite items from the Sky Mall of yesteryear.
Art Attack
Yeti (Sasquatch/Bigfoot) -related prints from Society6.
- Yeti by Diane Leonard
- Yeti by Vlad Stankovic
- Yeti by Erin Loughery
- Yeti at Night by Ryan Snook
- Yeti by Monster Tea Party
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