Zellers (no apostrophe, even though it was started by a guy named Zeller) was able to stay &#x27;on top&#x27; 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.<p>HBC bought them out in the early 80s and then started shovelling more acquisitions on top; Bonimart, Fields, Woodward&#x27;s. They had enough capital to start fixing things - in the mid to late 80s your parents probably remember &quot;Club Z&quot; and pushing aggressively against their remaining competition to make sure they had the lowest price in town.<p>In the late 90s, just as Walmart was starting to show up in Canada (by buying up the burned-out corpse of Woolworth&#x27;s) and threaten pretty much every brand under the HBC umbrella, HBC centralized decision making and planning in HBC&#x27;s Toronto offices and under HBC execs.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Canada is, in general, not kind to its department stores. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ottawacitizen.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;local-business&#x2F;canadas-big-box-graveyard-target-joins-illustrious-company" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ottawacitizen.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;local-business&#x2F;canadas-big...</a>