[alanctgardner3]

Do you have any insight into when Zeller's was good and what went wrong? HBC seems to have done a much better job turning around The Bay locations (albeit very gradually) and apparently they also own Saks?

I'm pretty young and all of my experiences were a combo of dirty, badly stocked stores, products that I didn't care about, bad fluorescent lighting, and employees who didn't give a shit. I also don't really shop at Walmart, but Walmart seems kind of sterile and organized, at least. I honestly did not know why anyone would ever go into a Zeller's - they had clothes and housewares and groceries and stuff, but somebody else seemed to do all of those things much better.

[ayuvar]

Zellers (no apostrophe, even though it was started by a guy named Zeller) was able to stay 'on top' of the Canadian department store game for quite some time. They were founded in the 20s, profitable well into the 90s, and had a niche and a format that was poorly understood by existing department stores. Their only real competition was K-Mart.

HBC bought them out in the early 80s and then started shovelling more acquisitions on top; Bonimart, Fields, Woodward's. They had enough capital to start fixing things - in the mid to late 80s your parents probably remember "Club Z" and pushing aggressively against their remaining competition to make sure they had the lowest price in town.

In the late 90s, just as Walmart was starting to show up in Canada (by buying up the burned-out corpse of Woolworth's) and threaten pretty much every brand under the HBC umbrella, HBC centralized decision making and planning in HBC's Toronto offices and under HBC execs.

K-Mart basically collapsed at this time from the same pressure; HBC opened up the purse and bought a lot of old K-Mart locations, intending to convert them. Eatons also died, and their assets were acquired by Sears.

I worked at Zellers to put myself through school briefly during this general time period, and I remember hysteria and confusion in all ranks of retail and management staff. Communication with HBC was generally command-and-control with no mechanism to individually fix brand-wide or regional problems.

Actual Bay stores in the late 90s were also doing poorly, and it was likely that Zellers was seen as a losing anchor that needed to slash margins further to compete with Walmart.

I will miss the chain. I had never really gone in prior to working there, but after working there I had gained enough weird institutional memory to be able to quickly find whatever I was looking for even in Zellers I had never visited before.

It is now basically a race in Canada to see if HBC or Sears will pull out first. Neither one of them are doing particularly well.

Canada is, in general, not kind to its department stores. http://ottawacitizen.com/business/local-business/canadas-big...