The projection system, you can see in a photo, was made by Vitarama. Vitarama developed a number of interesting projection systems, but their best known was Cinerama, the three-camera widescreen format that was briefly popular in the '50s but had long-lasting influence by popularizing widescreen films. One wonders if Fred Waller, Cinerama's inventor, worked on this project. He was sort of an inventor of the classic type.
In another photo we see what I think is a Teletype Model 15, behind the clerk handling an impressive rolodex. It even appears to have a Bell Canada Trans-Canada Telephone System badge on it. Transmitting orders was a very popular application of teletype service, and a lot of Bell advertising in both the US and Canada focused on customers like Hudson's Bay and Montgomery Ward.
> Today, shopping while sitting in a comfy chair instead of aimlessly wandering around a store is becoming second nature to a lot of us
This system however was a store that you had to go to in order to look at pictures of products (that you couldn't actually touch, try on or take with you like in a real store) - so it's actually the worst of both worlds. Of course it was a solution for shopping in remote places (hence Canada), but so was the (by that time already "good old") mail order catalog, which you could use in the comfort of your own home. Those were later updated with color pictures and telephone ordering, so they were as good as this system and in some ways better.
Well they invented the steam engine and the computer in Rome and Ancient Greece respectively, but they used the former for children's toys and the latter only to predict the timing of the olympic games (as far as we know). In Ancient South Asia they created an abstract and fully systematized language (Sanskrit), in Ancient Egypt they managed to stack massive blocks of sandstone into monuments with interiors that remained some of the highest buildings in the world for millennia...I'm sure there are equally impressive examples in Ancient China and Mesoamerica, but I don't know of them.
Its like that old debate in Marxist political economy, between forces and relations of production: is it technology itself that produces wealth, or is it the social arrangement (including the non-human natural and technical elements) that does? Clearly, if you look at history, all the wealth of today's world only came when all the great developments of the human world were synthesized into vast industrial convolutes--so perhaps in some sense its both.
Before (and during) this we had catalogs you browsed at home, and after choosing your purchases you called a number and made your order by wiring money or paying at reception.
And even before (and during) that you did the same thing via postal service.
In another photo we see what I think is a Teletype Model 15, behind the clerk handling an impressive rolodex. It even appears to have a Bell Canada Trans-Canada Telephone System badge on it. Transmitting orders was a very popular application of teletype service, and a lot of Bell advertising in both the US and Canada focused on customers like Hudson's Bay and Montgomery Ward.