Marketing Channels 8th Edition by Bert Rosenbloom

Exercise 4

The dramatic growth in online sales in recent years has led many pundits to predict that mail order channels driven by paper catalogs would virtually disappear. But this has not happened. By the close of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, over 17 billion catalogs were mailed to U.S. homes, which helped to produce over $700 billion in sales via this "old fashioned" channel of distribution.
Why do you think such vast numbers of paper catalogs are still printed and mailed and such high levels of sales are still generated in mail order channels?