Shop-Rite was a chain of
catalogue stores in
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...
,
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
, that operated from the 1970s to 1982. In a Shop-Rite catalogue store, customers would browse the catalogue, select their merchandise and apply to the store clerk for the item.
The chain began with four stores in
London, Ontario
London (pronounced ) is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 422,324 according to the 2021 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River, approximate ...
, in the early 1970s and was acquired in 1972 by
Hudson's Bay Company
The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; french: Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business di ...
(HBC)
HBC Heritage
/ref> when it purchased Middlesex Warehouse Sales Ltd., the operators of Shop-Rite catalogue stores. HBC, which operates The Bay department store chain and other retailers, expanded the chain to 60 stores within three years and built a large distribution centre in Brampton
Brampton ( or ) is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Brampton is a city in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and is a lower-tier municipality within Peel Region. The city has a population of 656,480 as of the 2021 Census, making it ...
.[ Shop-Rite had been running annual losses of $3 million as a result of waning consumer interest.][ It was expected that it would cost The Bay $8 million to close the chain, and that about 10 percent of Shop-Rite's staff would be offered jobs in The Bay.][ Wally Evans, president of The Bay at the time, said that in order to make the business viable, it would have to expand outside of Ontario, but that it did not have the money to do so.][
Shop-Rite was unable to compete with ]Consumers Distributing
Consumers Distributing (known in Quebec as Distribution aux Consommateurs, and informally as Consumers) was a catalogue store in Canada and the United States that operated from 1957 to 1996. At its peak, the company operated 243 outlets in Canad ...
, which had over 400 catalogue stores in 1981 and sales of 40 per cent more per store than Shop-Rite.[ Consumers Distributing closed in 1996 due mainly to the increase in big-box department stores like ]Zellers
Zellers was a Canadian discount department retail chain and is currently a brand name owned by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). Founded in 1931 in London, Ontario, in later decades it was based in Brampton, Ontario. Zellers was acquired by HBC ...
and Walmart
Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...
.
See also
* List of Canadian department stores
References
{{Hudson's Bay Trading Company, L.P.
Catalog showrooms
Companies based in London, Ontario
Defunct retail companies of Canada
Retail companies disestablished in 1982