Final Lessons from Zellers

Target is moving in to Canada, by buying up Zellers stores.  They're going about it a weird way: closing stores, selling everything down to the shelves, letting all the workers go, only to reopen the stores under the new brand.  Wal-mart also entered the Canadian marked by buying existing stores (of Woolco) but they kept them open and just gradually changed the stores over to their way of doing things.  You'd think that if any store chain considered itself so culturally unique that they would feel the need to shut stores down and start afresh, free of the unprofitableness cooties, it would be Wal-mart.  The idea that Target is even more controlling makes me a little uneasy.

Anyway, many of the Zellers that are being re-branded are now having everything-must-go clearance sales.  After going to a couple of these, here's what I've learned:

• Zellers employees are/were really nice.  Everyone I had to interact with was very polite and patient, in spite of the situation.  You earn a tiny salary, to begin with, your job has now been arbitrarily eliminated by a foreign company, and you're expected stay at work for a few weeks to sell off everything around you.
• We have an obesity problem.  When you have to sell men's size-small t-shirts at $1.49 and still can't get rid of them, we have a problem.  Small was the only size they had left, or I would have bought the "More people have read this shirt than your blog" shirt.
• Speaking of which, why do big-and-tall stores exist?  Surely anyone who has an unusual sized/shaped body just has to wait until the end of a sale and they'll find entire racks of clothing just for them.
• A clearance sale is a time to rethink security.  You've got expensive and easily concealable MP3 players just hanging on the racks, but you're going to make me call an employee over to unlock the video game cabinets just to get a $10 copy of Gran Turismo for the Play Station 2.
• Zellers stores are more organised in a desperate clearance than ever before.  Normally you have trouble finding a price on half the items, now everything has a big sign on it telling you how much it is.  And most of the time you find merchandise just lying around in aisles yet to be sorted on to shelves, so having it arranged on haphazard clearance racks is hardly different.
• I was right not to bother collecting Club Z points.  I'd still only be halfway to that toaster oven I wanted.