Where Am I Going to Shop Now?

The Zellers is gone, the Target is gone and, as of last week-end, the Sears is gone.  Our Sears, shown empty and closed in the picture, closed up in the fall because it was one of those messy, disorganized outlet stores.

My family, like so many across Canada, has shopped at Sears forever really. It was always there.  I can even vaguely remember when it was Simpson-Sears.   For the longest time, we had to rely on the Sears catalogue because we didn't have a store in our town.  Remember when you were a kid you'd start looking out for the Wishbook around Labour Day?  You'd flip right to the back where the toys were and start turning over page corners to mark your wishes.  

When I had my own kids I still shopped from the catalogue.  I used to walk down to the local plaza with one of the trouts in the stroller to the UPS store to pick up my packages.  I'd trudge home, try the stuff on and go back the next day to return them because the didn't fit or looked like shite.  I took me awhile to figure out that, hey, I could order 2 different sizes of that dress and save myself a load of time.

So when our mall got refurbished and a Sears was one of the anchors, I was  excited.  I could wander around the store which was on two levels and look at and touch the clothes before I took them to the change room.  I could take 15 things into the change room at once.  There were ladies I could ask for help. There were shiny cosmetic counters with make-up and skin care I couldn't afford but could try out.  Upstairs, the catalogue pick-up counter shared space with a little café that overlooked the rest of the mall (you can see the windows of it in the photo).  There were  phones on some of the tables with A DIRECT LINE TO THE CATALOGUE ORDER DESK!!! somewhere in New Brunswick, I think.  All the clothes the Trouts wore came from Sears.  Our first washer and dryer, which only gave up the ghost last year, came from Sears.  Himself has loads of Craftsmen tools in his toolbox.  I bought curtains for most of the windows in this house from Sears.  Sears was always the first place I went for anything.

Now it's gone.

It's been in decline for years and nobody seemed to be able to fix it.  Our store went from a fairly decent store to one of those outlet stores which seemed to be just a dumping ground for all the shit the other stores couldn't sell. It was a mess.  The Sears store in the next town got a big renovation in the hopes of attracting back the people who stopped shopping there when is was declining but to no avail. Apparently, the head office in the States had been taking money from Sears Canada to solve their own financial problems. 

It's the ladies who worked there I feel sorry for.  And it is mostly women because who else but women work the shit retail jobs.  Some of those ladies had been at our store since the beginning and would have been entitled to a decent pension.  Not now. While the executives who engineered the demise of the company are riding off into the sunset with multi-million dollar bonuses, the women and men who worked the shit hours for shit money for years are getting sweet fuck all.  That just doesn't seem right.

So here we are with a huge hole in the retail landscape in Canada.  We better hope The Bay doesn't pack it in or we'll be left with nowhere to shop.