Many welcome Target, won’t mourn Zellers loss

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This article was published 15/01/2011 (5406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — The loss of an iconic Canadian brand name such as Zellers might bother some people, but many others are simply looking forward to it being replaced with a better shopping alternative.

Zellers is poised to become the latest of several retail chains Canadians grew up with that no longer exist. This week, U.S. giant Target Corp., said it is buying the rights to most Zellers stores across the country from Hudson’s Bay Co. Target is slated to begin operations in Canada in 2013, and the Zellers name is not expected to survive in any meaningful way after that.

“I don’t mind at all,” says Marie Eveline, 60, as she exits one of longest-standing Zellers outlets in downtown Ottawa. “I shop at Target all the time in the States.”

Canadians have shopped at Zellers since the early 1930s, when Kitchener, Ont., native Walter Zeller launched the chain after buying the Canadian outlets of bankrupt American retailer Schulte-United.

Eveline says Zellers has failed to keep up with its competition in recent years, although she still shops there sometimes because she refuses to go to Walmart.

Other retail chains that have disappeared in Canada in the last few decades — some of them Canadian-owned, some not — include Eaton’s, Woolco, Woolworth’s, Kmart, Simpsons and Beaver Lumber.

Outside of retail, some major Canadian corporate brands that have been bought out by foreign players or virtually disappeared recently include Nortel, Alcan, Stelco and Inco.

Taking part in a local television call-in show the day Target’s purchase of Zellers was announced, Joseph Martin, a professor of Canadian business history at the University of Toronto, says the response of viewers was overwhelmingly positive.

“The great majority of the callers were clearly excited about Target coming to Canada because they thought Zellers was a poor company,” he says. “One of the callers specifically said, ‘This saves me a trip to Buffalo.’ “

Martin says Canadians are not completely unsympathetic to supporting homegrown businesses. But for the most part, he says, they’re looking for good value for their money.

“If your product isn’t competitively priced, if you are not offering a positive experience and all the other things… then being Canadian certainly is not enough,” he says. “You’ve got to be good, as well.”

Louis Gialloreto, a retail and brand-management expert with McGill University in Montreal, says there is minimal sentimentality among Canadians with regard to Canadian-owned stores or those they grew up with.

“They’re just looking for the best deals,” he says. “Canadians have shown over the years that they vote with their feet.

“If you were to say to them, ‘This company, which is Canadian and has been around for a long time, is going to go bankrupt unless Canadians start buying more from them,’ they’d say, ‘OK. Give me a better value proposition and I’ll buy from you.'”

Sally Chivers, a professor of Canadian studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., says history shows Canadians lose little sleep over the loss of national icons.

“I think we lost our sacred cows when Disney held the copyright for the Mountie image and Tim Hortons went to U.S. ownership,” she says, noting both have since returned to Canadian hands.

— Postmedia News