TORONTO — Hudson’s Bay Company has unveiled a list of the first 25 Zellers locations to open inside select Hudson’s Bay department stores across Canada.
This past August, HBC announced that it was reviving the Zellers banner, a decade after the discount chain closed most of its stores in Canada. The company said these new Zellers locations will offer home decor items, toys, baby gear, clothes and pet accessories.
Five of the locations will be in Quebec: at Galeries d’Anjou, in east Montreal; Place Rosemère, on the north shore of Montreal; Galeries de la Capitale in Quebec City; Promenades Gatineau in the Outaouais region; and Carrefour de l’Estrie in Sherbrooke.
Among the nine sites allotted to Ontario, two will be in Ottawa: at the Rideau Centre downtown, and at the St. Laurent Shopping Centre. Other Ontario locations include Erin Mills in Mississauga, Scarborough Town Centre, and Burlington Mall. British Columbia gets four including one in downtown Vancouver and there will be five locations in the Prairies.
In the four Atlantic provinces, only two Nova Scotia locations have been announced, in Halifax and Sydney.
As well as opening in-person locations, Zellers is launching a new e-commerce website.
Zellers was founded in 1931 and acquired by HBC in 1978. The banner reached its height at the end of the 1990s, with around 350 locations, before losing ground to big-box competitors like Walmart.
In 2011, HBC announced it intended to sell the majority of its remaining Zellers leases to American company Target, closing most of the locations by 2013, though Target’s subsequent venture in Canada was a fiasco.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 18, 2023.
