In his Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture some years ago, the gifted theoretical physicist Elliott Montroll recounted a statistical analysis of the prices of merchandise offered in the Sears annual catalog during the first 85 years of the twentieth century. That catalog, which Montroll termed “a magnificent database of Americana,” was pre-pared carefully to feature items that reflected current public taste at prices that were appropriate for competitive merchandising of the time. The price of an item that was sold by Sears over many years would, of course, be expected to change in the catalog as the cost of living changed, or as technology related to the manufacture of the item improved. Some catalog items (e.g., the buggy whips sold in the 1910 catalog) would disappear altogether and be replaced as new technologies made them obsolete.

Despite the many vicissitudes of American life and of company operation, Montroll found that the frequency distribution of the prices in any one of the Sears catalogs published since 1900 closely approximated a lognormal distribution. More remarkably, the single-catalog standard deviation of the logarithm of price remained essentially constant over the 85-year period, although the single-catalog mean of the logarithm of price generally increased annually, reflecting an increasing cost of living.