Anecdotal, but no it didn’t make sense at the time, at least for customers. While I don’t know why my the catalog business wasn’t profitable, it was certainly popular in my family’s circle. For Christmas alone, it should have covered the year, or clothes at every change of seasons
Actually, the catalog was also a big driver of store visits, but maybe they didn’t know how to value that.
Coming from the early days of online shopping, they seemed to be in a perfect position where they already had the model and distribution, so they could have added online for very little additional cost and let it grow up