TV's were sold in appliance shoppes and department stores like Sears, Montgomery Wards (remember them), others ... there was no Walmart or ____ <== big box retailer here.

My uncle ( now dead for 20 years) owned a small chain of furniture stores in the 1960's the stores also sold large appliances TVs, Refrigerators, Washer and Dryers. The store had delivery trucks ( price included "free delivery" ) and the delivery men. If you paid the extra $5, the delivery men boxed and "set up" the TV -- put it in it's desired place and plugged it in, warmed it up ( TV's had vacuum tubes back then ), then left you with a working TV.

Rabbit rears were good enough where we lived. Maybe, we could not afford an antenna and a rotator? The picture would get bad occasionally and we would put flags of aluminium foil on the antenna's rabbit ears :P

That was black and white TV back then. One neighbor bought a color TV in the mid 60s, they were like $700 back then ($3,500 in today's value -- a month's pay for a joe-worker). He had an antenna with a rotator for the color TV, a console model.