Why I shop via print catalogs in 2025

← Back to Kevin's homepagePublished: 2025 Aug 31

If you’re shopping for any kind of specialty hardware, I recommend skipping the manufacturer’s website and looking at their print (PDF) catalog instead. It’ll probably have more detailed comparisons between product lines and their options and will be faster to navigate quickly. (The search is “local-first”, as the kids say.)

Great websites are possible in theory, but unfortunately they’re still not the norm in practice — for whatever reason, it seems like web designers have an extreme phobia of information density.

I’ll demonstrate two examples of print catalog superiority that came up recently while I was shopping for hardware for my flatpack bed.

We’ll then look at what to do when no such well-designed catalog exists — have an LLM condense the anemic “page 1-of-17” e-commerce website slop into a readable spreadsheet.

Catalog examples

I love Spax screws because:

Unfortunately the Spax website won’t explain the different kinds and when to use them. First you choose a family via comically large images (hopefully you’ll discover that hovering makes carousel arrows appear on the left/right so you can paw around):

Selecting a family gets you to the “we threw attributes in Elastic Search so you can choose numbers via drop-down” half-assed CMS thing.

Then, once you’ve selected a surface finish, you can hunt for a specific size and length (but you can only look at five options at a time!):

Compare the information density of their website with their catalog, which actually tells you stuff like the differences between surface finishes:

Each family of screws has a table that just shows all of the variations and a technical drawing, no need to click anything. They even have a diagram which explains this table and how the information is depicted on the physical box of screws!

Spax’s website isn’t uniquely bad here — it’s really quite average. After I bought screws, I tried buying threaded inserts from a German manufacturer that has been family-run for six generations (!!?!)

Unfortunately, the family settles for the same e-commerce slop design. This is literally the landing page for their “online shop” — I guess they assume you also have a century’s worth of family history about threaded inserts to know which one is suitable for your project:

Once you’ve selected a specific kind of insert, you are greeted with a bunch of categorical dimensions to choose from:

To their credit, they’ve made all of the options visible so you can at least see them at a glance.

However, actually selecting a specific insert is a perverse game of whack-a-mole, since every time you select a new dimension you:

  1. have to wait 5 seconds for the page to load, and
  2. need to double check that previously-selected dimensions haven’t been randomly changed out from under you (if the combination you wanted doesn’t exist)

(Also note the blue box in the top right; I had to register with my European business VAT number before I could even see pricing — can’t have individuals buying threaded inserts!)

As with the screws, apparently the competent designers were on the print catalog, which also takes advantage of the groundbreaking technology of TABLES:

This lets them fit all of the variations on one page, with room to spare to include both English and German labels! (However, points deducted for running the technical drawing one too many times through a fax machine.)

The situation here is so vexing to me! Both companies have been around for more than a hundred years, so they had printed catalogs already designed when they made their first websites. Why didn’t they just…put the catalog online?

It’s certainly possible — McMaster-Carr has reigned as the G.O.A.T. e-commerce website for doing exactly this. The website and printed catalog look pretty much the same, except that on the website you can click an item number to open a little yellow box that lets you add the item to your cart:

(From an insider: “I worked on http://mcmaster.com for two years and the way it actually happened was that the software side was tyrannically overseen by a print publishing department with insanely strict quality standards”.)

I’m not saying a single threaded-insert manufacturer’s website needs to be as fast and comprehensive as McMaster-Carr’s. But, for whatever reason, they seem to have paid for a lot of JavaScript and ended up with something far worse than a state-of-the-1996-art HTML 2.0 <table> tag, dashes and pipes in monospaced text or, hell, even a large PNG image of their existing catalog with clickable <area> tags thrown on top.

Back in 2006 our guy Bret Victor said information software design is graphic design, but unfortunately here in 2025 it seems like most web developers still haven’t gotten the memo.

When you have no table (use an LLM to make you one)

Alas, we can’t always buy directly from manufacturers, as even the most ambitious projects don’t always meet minimum order quantities on the order of thousands / tons / shipping containers. Sometimes we’re confined to retailers (from the Old French “retaillier”, as in “cutting a huge lot into smaller quantities”).

In this case, there’s no information designer or PDF catalog in sight — just text search and, maybe, a hierarchical categorization of products.

For example, recently I wanted to build a workbench, but wasn’t sure how to do it since I’m not familiar with European lumber standards (what’s the Euro version of the North American 2x4?).

I Google-Translated my way to the right section of the Hornbach.nl website:

but it’s pretty difficult to get an overview of the sizes and lengths of the sticks here — I don’t exactly want to scroll through all 70 resultaten (102 varianten). Furthermore, I also want to know the lineal cost, since there’s no point in paying extra for a long stick that I’d immediately cut down into small workbench-sized pieces.

What to do?

Well, the saving-grace of websites is inspect element:

Just highlight one result, copy as HTML, and ask your favorite LLM to eat the garbage for you:

Please write some JavaScript I can paste into my browser dev tools console that selects all product results which look like the following HTML and prints out the title, cost, width, height, and length. Please also calculate the linear cost per meter. Print everything out as a single string so I can paste it into a spreadsheet.

Claude (always handy via the gptel Emacs package) and I had a quick chat, it wrote this JavaScript, and voilà:

This helped me narrow down to what I needed. Filtering and sorting numeric quantities using a spreadsheet, we truly live in the future.

Alas, LLMs can’t help that lumber dimensions are also messed up here in Europe. In North America a “2x4” is actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches, as the nominal dimension refers to the lumber before it was planed. In Europe they’re at least sold actual size — 44mm by 44mm or 94mm — but the nice round numbers (multiples of 50mm) can be enjoyed only by the folks at the sawmill operating the planer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.