Southern Ontario Retail Blog

Historic retailer Hudson's Bay will begin liquidating all but 6 stores and close by June 30th. This comes after they've filed for creditor's protection earlier this month on March 7th. This also includes the Canadian Saks Fifth Avenue locations as these were operated by Hudson’s Bay under a license agreement with Saks Global. I saw this coming as they began to operate on reduced hours, some of their stores suffered from maintenance issues, the stores were tired looking, and were devoid of customers. They did remodel a few high-profile locations and tried to relaunch Zellers as a section in Hudson’s Bay a few years ago to no success. I do hope that Hudson’s Bay somehow gets saved so the brand can live on, but I’m not holding my breath on that. We’ll wait and see I guess . Edit : Corrected to say that Hudson’s Bay will liquidate with expected end date. Also, I saw an article that said that 6 stores will be spared from liquidation. 3 in Ontario and 3 in Quebec. Here’s the lis...

Loblaw announced that they will be piloting a new deep discount No Name grocer in 3 markets in Ontario later this month. These stores will be in Windsor, St. Catharines, and Brockville. The No Name "Store for Savings" will have shorted hours (10am-7pm), carry a more limited selection of about 1300 products, mostly from Loblaw's private labels PC and No Name and no refrigerated goods initially. Loblaw tried a similar concept back in 2013 called Box by No Frills (later simplified to Box). These stores then closed or converted into regular No Frills stores a few years later. It will be interesting to see if these new No Name stores suffer the same fate.

Best Buy Express Logo  Image Credit: Best Buy Back in January of this year, Bell announced a partnership with Best Buy to convert 165 The Source locations to the Best Buy Express banner by the end of this year with locations that do not get converted closing. For those who don't know, The Source started out as the Canadian branch of RadioShack before being acquired by Circuit City in 2005 and being rebranded to The Source by Circuit City. Then in 2009, Bell acquired the chain and re-named it The Source. Some The Source locations in the blog’s coverage area are running a pre-renovation sale, so I assume that’s in preparation for the conversion to Best Buy Express. It will be interesting to see how these stores will look like in person. The first location in Surrey BC opened today according to a  press release.  According to the one image at that link, it looks largely the same as a typical remodeled The Source location, just with Best Buy branding just as I predicted....

As you might know already, Lowe’s sold their Canadian division to a private equity company, Sycamore Partners, earlier this year. Rona then announced that the Lowe's stores will be gradually re-branded as Rona+. These conversions started at the end of July with 10 stores in Ontario. So far all they did was replace all the Lowe’s logos with Rona+ logos with the Lowe's decor remaining intact. What’s interesting about Rona+ is that some Lowe’s stores were converted from larger Rona stores. So in a way, this will go full circle at some locations. Hopefully this will be successful for Rona. Until the next post (hopefully it won’t be another 2 years), Dom

I recently went into my first Walmart with Airport decor,  and here's my first impressions of it. The Walmart I went to, located at Dixie and Dundas in Mississauga, opened in March of 2013 with Project Impact. In Summer of 2021, the store started to remodel. At first I thought they were going to get the same package as the Dufferin Mall store . When I walked in today, I was surprised to see the full US version of Airport. When I went, they were just wrapping up the remodel. The Canadian division was previously using their own decor package based on Bogle with custom elements for grocery and light-up signs. That's all gone now as for the first time since Cheap Impact(which was rarely used in Canada), Walmart Canada is using the exact same decor package as the US division with minor localization changes. Impressions The following are my mostly positive impressions and observations on the Airport decor. The outside is using the old blue, yellow and grey scheme, which has been the ...

Welcome back to another post. Sorry for not posting since May. Lately, I don't have the time to sit down and write a blog post. For now on, posts will be infrequent on this blog as a result, so expect random months long breaks. Anyways, here's some exciting recent retail news. EB Games Canada Finally Rebrands to GameStop GameStop announced today that they will be rebranding EB Games and EBX stores in Canada to GameStop by the end of 2021. They already rebranded their website, so it's only a matter of time to see new signage roll out to stores. It kind of sucks to see the EB Games banner get phased out, but I'm glad to finally see the GameStop banner expand in Canada. Source:  Global News Toys "R" Us Canada sold to owner of Sunrise Records Toys "R" Us will be sold to Doug Putman, owner of the Sunrise Records chain from Fairfax Financial , current owners of the chain, for a undisclosed amount. It's going to be interesting to see if there will be an...