Goodbye, Eastbay, and Thanks for Everything

Chances are if you’re a Millennial or older, you have fond memories of receiving the Sears Wishbook every autumn in preparation for Christmas. The department store’s annual mail-order catalog lived up to its name, offering countless goods a young consumer could only wish of seeing under the tree on Dec. 25.

For example, the Wishbook often featured a crossbow in the Outdoors section. Now, I did not hunt, nor have I ever hunted. But I did love fantasy media like the animated Hobbit film and Willow, so of course I assumed I had thousands of practical applications for a crossbow.

I never did get one, because my parents aren’t morons, but the Wishbook at least let me imagine how awesome it would be to receive on Christmas.

As I matured and my wants became more refined, Eastbay replaced the Wishbook as the glossy-paged source of my consumerist longings. And topping the Wishbook, Eastbay’s seasonal release schedule kept me spending hypothetical money my jobless, adolescent-and-teenaged self didn’t have.

Eastbay officially ceases operations at week’s end, though the company’s demise was a dragged-out inevitability. Eastbay occupied two separate spaces utterly decimated in the 21st Century: the hard-copy magazine industry, and mail-order commerce in direct competition with the behemoth Amazon.

So inevitable was a company like Eastbay’s closure, in fact, I only discovered it was still alive upon learning of its impending shuttering.

Like most Eastbay shoppers — or, perhaps more accurately, Eastbay wishers — I fell away from my regular perusal of the catalog in the 2000s. The internet at large replaced Eastbay, which never seemed to quite catch up in the e-commerce department.

Wistfully reminiscing on the collapse of a catalog might be a little silly, perhaps even crass. But only now years after I drifted away from it do I appreciate Eastbay’s significance not so much as a place to blow through whatever little money I had as a kid, but as a source for shaping my cultural tastes.

Much like SLAM Magazine in the same era, which covered basketball as culture as much as sport and melded musical influence into its coverage, Eastbay exposed a youngster in rural Arizona to fashion choices I’d have otherwise had no access to.

Only in my adult life have I come to appreciate fashion choices not just as a Stuff To Wear, but an expression of self.

Perhaps that comes off as an obvious statement, but it’s a sentiment I’ve only come to truly appreciate in recent years. Fashion reflects our interests — and in my peak Eastbay-thumbing days, I was a basketball junkie, demonstrated in my wardrobe of Nikes and shooting shirts.

Best believe I rocked this beauty as a teen — but didn’t have the sweet Mickey bed sheets displayed in this Google Images photo.

On the flipside, I worked at CBS for a few years after college and didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but grappled with some serious depression. I was floundering professionally and had no idea of how to get my life goals back on track.

Perhaps subconsciously, my wardrobe reflected my rut; I wore a lot of T-shirts and polos from clients given out at our office paired with out-of-style shorts I bought in college.

My fashion choices since improved dramatically, though admittedly are considerably more sophisticated than they were in the Eastbay days — at least, everywhere but in the shoe department.

A pair of new basketball shoes still excites me, and no product better characterizes that not all progress is inherent improvement. Eastbay collected all the new shoes from every company into one location, delivered straight to your mailbox every two months.

The most recent pair of shoes I purchased, a pair of Kawhi Leonard-signature New Balance “Goosebumps” edition, I lucked into spotting on social media when an RL Stine tweet came across my timeline.

Keeping up with releases in a more fractured media landscape is a chore, and that’s before even getting into the nightmare that is the SNKRS app or resellers hording Jordans.

Maybe for old time’s sake, I need to flip through the last Eastbay and see what basketball shoes are out there I’m not even privy to. And hey — as I discovered growing up more than 100 miles from the nearest full-scale shopping mall — I can count on Eastbay to have my size 13s.