Say you were in the 1920s or 1970s. If you wanted to find a store to buy music or just any store that catered to a specific niche, how would you have gone about finding out what your options were?
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The first place to look was a business directory. These were usually called yellow pages and were a kind of phone book but instead of sorting people by name it sorted businesses by category. So you could look up the music store category and get a list of all music stores.
But a lot of times you would have to ask the staff at a store, even if it was not the right store. The staff was expected to know a lot more about their field then they are today. If you went into a music store and asked for a particular genera or a specific band that they did not have in that store they could tell you which other nearby music store would have that in stock. The advantage to the store was that you typically went to them first for any question which would gain them sales.
You also had a lot of catalogs. Stores would get catalogs from distributors sent to them all the time so they could pick which wares to carry and not. These catalogs were kept in the store so that if a customer wanted they could look through this catalog and order things from it through the store. So if you came to a music store and asked for a niche genera that they did not carry they would show up with a few catalog from different record companies and show you the pages they had on this genera. You could then pick out a few albums and the store would have those in stock in a few days.
There were also a lot more magazines available before the Internet. If you were interested in something you would probably subscribe to the magazine for that topic. And the magazine would have a lot of advertisements, many were not that different from the catalogs the companies would issue. They would even print order forms as part of the advertisement that you could send inn and have it shipped to you.
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