‘Footprint Rationalization’: Sears adds to Woes of Canada’s Malls
After bouts of store closings that started in 2013, Sears Canada has about 95 department stores, 10 outlet stores, and 40 home stores left. Now, according to the Globe and Mail, it will close even more stores.
It’s been tough for brick-and-mortar retailers in Canada. The collapse of the price of oil and the brutal drubbing administered to the tar-sands sector, the high-cost oil producer globally, haven’t helped. The overall economy is uneasy. And the migration to online shopping is unstoppable, a phenomenon that is also wreaking havoc among brick-and-mortar retailers in the US.
How tough is it in Canada’s retail land? Some salient recent examples:
Target, after only a little over two years in Canada, shuttered its 133 stores and was gone by April 2015, an episode that cost it $7 billion.
Best Buy closed 66 of its Future Shop stores in March 2015 and converted the remaining 65 to struggling Best Buy stores.
Then there’s Blacks, a Canadian camera shop chain that also sold cellphones and other things. It and its 113 stores were acquired by Canadian PE firm ReichmannHauer Capital Partners in 2007, when PE firms piled into brick-and-mortar retail. RHCP was smart enough to sell it in 2009 to telecom operator Telus, who shuttered the remaining stores in August 2015.
Sony closed all of its 14 stores in Canada in early 2015.
Mexx Canada, a Netherlands-based retailer, liquidated all its 95 stores in Canada in early 2015.
Reitmans, a Canadian retailer specializing in women’s clothing under a number of different store brands, announced in November 2014 that it would close 107 Smart Set stores.
A spate of US retailers, including Gap and Staples, have announced that they would close stores in “North America,” without specifying how many of their stores in Canada would be closed.
In terms of population, Canada is smaller than California. So this has an impact.
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