What Will The Decade Of The 2020's Look Like ?
/I recently wrote a post in the futurists blog titled, “When Reflecting Back on The Roaring Twenties The 2020’s Should Be an Equally Interesting Decade With Great Promise and Terrifying Risk”.
Indeed there are many interesting parallels between the roaring 20’s and current times, although they may not be obvious yet. Sometimes we can forget and lose perspective about what was happening way back when after the Spanish Flu was extinguished in 1919. The history is fascinating and when put in the context of today’s rapid technological and cultural change, the hopeful end of COVID19, and its impact on people’s lives, the comparison helps create a parallel between the post Spanish Flu era and today and what may lie ahead.
As with Amazon today, more frequently anything not available in a local store in the early years of the 20th century, could be ordered by mail . The Montgomery Ward catalog was first issued in 1872, with Sears first publishing theirs in 1894. Mail-order business emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century as well. By 1900, Sears was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day, and its catalog featured coats, furnaces, furniture, shoes, and even homes. Sears sold over 70,000 mail-order homes between 1908 and 1940. The expansion of mail order was largely enabled by the Parcel Post, which came to be in the US in 1913; Fed-Ex anyone?
Read more about the similarities between one hundred years ago and now here.