gabe
Senior Member
Canadian Tire is the worst. Cramped aisle ways. Makes nearly impossible to shop with a cart. Messy stores. No staff to help. And Canadian Tire is famous for never have the advertise sale items in stock.
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Target
- Thread starter samsonyuen
- Start date
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
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grey
Senior Member
They also sell a lot of garbage that breaks.
nfitz
Superstar
Indeed they do. I bought some drinking glasses from Canadian Tire 20 years ago, and I swear half of them have broken!
Surely in this day and age, you have to stock cheap stuff as well as expensive stuff. Surely the cheap stuff is going to break ... why people haven't figured that out, and keep buying the cheap stuff I don't know ...
NorthYorkEd
Active Member
Agree. Went to their store on Sheppard (near Leslie) and the service was terrible. Staff looked completely bored and disinterested, and could barely summon the energy to point me towards the general area where the item I was looking for was supposed to be (which they didn't have). God forbid they actually walk us over and give us a few minutes of time, maybe check other stores for stock, etc. God forbid.
If they (or any other bricks and mortar retailer)ever wonder why people are ordering more and more products online, this is why.
foodwatcher
New Member
You may be right about the grocery store pilot but the reality is that there wasn't a major grocery store that was willing to work on a partnership basis with Canadian Tire for that pilot test. It is well known in the grocery industry that the original supplier for the Canadian Tire grocery pilot was Sobeys Ontario wholesale division (called Lumsden Brothers at the time) but they decided shortly into the start of the test to stop selling to Canadian Tire. This decision had to do with some internal politics within the Sobeys organization.
Tuscani01
Senior Member
Sobeys was the supplier for Q, a gas bar concept which was scrapped long before Sobeys pulled out. Only 3 stores opened, and they were completely separate Sobeys stores. They simply leased a small building at the gas station and ran mini grocery stores.
They never supplied stores. CT used its own distribution channels for the store pilot. The stores that had groceries, and continue to have groceries are now buying directly from the same supplier that the pilot relied on. Canadian Tire never went into it looking for a partnership. We built a supply chain from scratch for it.
I definitely think a partnership would have been the better way to go, as it would have been easier than building up from scratch, however, with stores being privately owned and operated, every square foot of space is important to the owners. To give it up to a product line where a huge chunk of the already razor thin profit goes to a completely different company wouldn't fly at CT. Having our own banners within a store barely works for dealers, let alone a different company entirely.
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donoreo
Active Member
A friend of mine in Burlington has seen the location on Appleby have something in stock on Thursday then disappear from the floor before the sale starts on Friday. More than once he has noticed this.
Cramped,messy stores without helpful staff does seem to be the norm.
Tuscani01
Senior Member
Highly doubt the dealer would order that product be removed from the shelf a day before the sale. I've worked at 4 different stores now, and have never seen this happen, and I've been in charge of all promo/deals. It's likely a case of someone else purchasing the item, whether it be staff or another customer. Most stores will give you the sale price a day before if you simply ask, and most regular customers take advantage of this. Rainchecks can also be issued on most items, except for special buys. In the case of special buys, their sale price is the same as the regular price, so there is no benefit to holding the item back until a sale is over... because its price will always be the sale price until it sells out.
Cramped and messy stores is the norm for most of the older stores. Newer stores have wider aisles and much more open layouts. Non helpful staff is the norm in most stores in the GTA. At the end of the day, staffing is entirely up to the owner though. I tend to detour out to Leslie Lakeshore when I need something from Canadian Tire. It's the store that corporate always uses for media events and is usually spotless and well organized. Staff are decent there too. Bay Dundas is by far the worst I have ever been to for anything.
Leslie/Lakeshore is the CT store I shop, and I agree, it's always in tip-top shape -- and as an added bonus, the Service Ontario location that's in the store is hardly ever busy!
Skeezix
Senior Member
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Back to Target, I see in today's paper that a number of the major landlords had sought to push Target into actual bankruptcy (as opposed to CCAA) so as to take the sale of leases out of Target's hands and to put the court-appointed monitor in charge of the process. They've made a deal whereby the monitor will take control of running the process (while Target gets to remain under CCAA) and deadlines have been set. Apparently June 30 is the absolute drop dead date, and any lease not sold by that date will be returned to the landlord.
So, to my novice eyes, it sounds like we'll have an idea fairly soon as to which leases get snapped up and which ones don't.
So, to my novice eyes, it sounds like we'll have an idea fairly soon as to which leases get snapped up and which ones don't.
Johnny Au
Senior Member
Target would need to hurry up and have deeper discounts for its liquidation sales to entice more people to help clean out its inventory.
Tuscani01
Senior Member
I wonder how many hoops they would need to jump through to just truck their inventory back to the states and just push it through their US distribution system?
Also, I'm surprised they aren't already shutting stores down and consolidating. Stores were pretty empty before liquidation began, and are even more empty now. Might as well start shutting some down and moving stock into better performing locations.
Johnny Au
Senior Member
Some of the Target inventory cannot be shipped to the United States (especially given how many products sold at Target have French-language labels, as well as measurements being in metric only). Oh, and Target Canada sells Kinder Surprise, which is banned in the United States (since it contains a non-edible product within an edible product).
It would have been wise to consolidate all remaining Target inventory in the Greater Toronto Area to the Stockyards location, as it is the largest, least empty, and definitely the busiest.
foodwatcher
New Member
Tuscani01, I know that you work in Store Support (Retail City ?) for Canadian Tire but your information here is not correct. Lumsden Brothers, a Division of Sobeys, was the original supplier of food into the pilot stores on the food test except for those products (e.g. commercial bakery, dairy) that go direct store delivery into grocery stores. Sobeys pulled out of the test very early into it for internal political reasons which required Canadian Tire to scramble for an alternative source of supply which is how they ended up working with their current supplier whom I believe is Karry's.
It is also fairly well known in the industry that Sobeys and Canadian Tire worked together between 2004 and 2006 on a number of initiatives including the development of a joint store "Supercentre" concept that got as far as a store layout and drawing stage. One of the outcomes of this work was Sobeys participation in the "Q" store concept as well as the Sobeys-Canadian Tire gas promotion that ran for a while during that time period.
It is hard enough for different functions and subsidiaries in any company to work together but almost impossible for a joint venture between related companies to work productively over the long term. I know that this was one of the issues that Sobeys had during the "Supercentre" discussion as they had a failed JV with K-Mart in Atlantic Canada many, many years ago. However, it is a moot point, as there wasn't a major grocery store operator that was interested in supplying the stores let along something as complicated as a JV.
It is also fairly well known in the industry that Sobeys and Canadian Tire worked together between 2004 and 2006 on a number of initiatives including the development of a joint store "Supercentre" concept that got as far as a store layout and drawing stage. One of the outcomes of this work was Sobeys participation in the "Q" store concept as well as the Sobeys-Canadian Tire gas promotion that ran for a while during that time period.
It is hard enough for different functions and subsidiaries in any company to work together but almost impossible for a joint venture between related companies to work productively over the long term. I know that this was one of the issues that Sobeys had during the "Supercentre" discussion as they had a failed JV with K-Mart in Atlantic Canada many, many years ago. However, it is a moot point, as there wasn't a major grocery store operator that was interested in supplying the stores let along something as complicated as a JV.