Out With The Old.

When I was a little girl back in Nova Scotia, one of our big family routines was shopping. It was our family event, the thing we did together the most. We’d pile in to the car and drive the 20 minutes in to “town” to go to the mall. As far as malls go, it wasn’t a big one. A grocery store, a drugstore, a Reitmans, a restaurant. Record store, shoe store, gift store. A standard small town mall. And at one end was Zellers.

At night I still have dreams about that mall, about that store. It was such a part of my youth that it’s actually burned in to my brain. I still distinctly remember walking up to the entrance and going through the big double doors. Straight ahead and a little to the left was the Womens and Girls clothing section, where I’d scour for hours to find clothes and try them on in the cramped, rickety changing rooms with pins on the floor. If you walked down the aisle to the back corner, you reached the toy section where I would inspect the Barbies and determine which one was the best value for money. In the other corner near the mall entrance there was a restaurant, I think it was called the Skillet, even though I never knew what that word meant. I still remember sliding in to the wooden booths and eating the hottest, crispiest french fries and golden triangles of fish, served by women who called me Dear. Next to the skillet was the pet section where I bought my first - and many subsequent replacement - guppies and neons and goldfish.

I remember walking through that store with my sister after she had had nose surgery and had a cast taped to her face, two black eyes peering out above it. People were staring, and I was embarrassed. I told my sister about the staring and she said, “it’s good for them.”

I remember being in Zellers and picking out batteries for my tape recorder, the one my friend Maggie and I would spend hours using as we recorded our own pretend television shows, positive we were destined for fame. I held the batteries in my hand and kept walking around the store until I decided I was done and headed out in to the mall, completely forgetting I still had the batteries in my grasp. Halfway through the mall I realized my error and, too petrified of getting caught to return them and feeling too guilty to keep them, left them on a table near the stairs in the middle of the mall for someone else to find.

We tried Hostess fruit-flavoured chips at Zellers, my brother and sister and I. We each got a different bag, one grape, one cherry, one orange. We didn’t finish them. They were awful, even to our adolescent greasy-is-good palates. The flavours disappeared from the shelves a few months later.

I picked out the first comforter for my bed in our new house there when I was 15. I wanted the flowery one but for some reason I picked the blue striped one. The boy pattern. I didn’t want to seem frilly; didn’t want to be laughed at. Not long after, I got a new bed that demanded a bigger comforter. This time, I got the flowery one.

Lots of things, good and bad, happened to me in and around that store. In an area where the biggest social event was going to the mall, the stores themselves became part of our stories, part of our personalities.

I haven’t been there in many years. I don’t even know if it’s still there. Sometime in the early 80s the New Mall opened in the same town, a mall with a Woolco, a shiny new Woolco that gave the older Zellers a run for its money. The Woolco itself became a victim of the march of US retailers several years ago and became a Wal-Mart. The old mall underwent many changes over the years and is partly office space now. So I don’t know if that old mall is, like many others across the country, soon going to contain a Target store instead of a Zellers store.

Yesterday on Twitter I saw people rejoicing the arrival of Target in Canada, with their selection and prices and fun vibe. But I was sad. Zellers may have been purchased by an American conglomerate years ago, but it was still ours, at least on the outside. Zellers, with their big red sign, spelled with a Zed, not a Zee, thank you very much. Even their signs still said “Truly Canadian”. No more. Now it’s to be replaced be yet another American chain, just here to turn a profit. And I mourn. I mourn the ongoing homogenization of our cities, where driving in to the outskirts of Ottawa is the same as driving in to the outskirts of Halifax or Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, with big box Staples and PetSmart and BestBuy and Boston Pizza and a dozen other bland, ubiquitous brands. And now with the addition of Target, the hugely successful American chain, the outskirts of those Canadian cities will look no different than the outskirts of Kansas City or Boise, Idaho.

I wonder, now, what is it that makes us Canadian, after all, except for our uniquely Canadian experiences? And how many of those are truly left, at least in the shopping world? Woolco, Woolworths, Metropolitan, Radio Shack, Eatons. How could we lose Eatons? Even The Bay is owned by Americans. And now we’re losing Zellers.

Change is inevitable, and usually it’s for the better. (The addition of a popular Target in the middle of desolate Sparks street will be nothing but a good thing, for example). But this time, I’m not sure.We’re gaining another fun place to shop for things we probably don’t need. And we’re losing our own history, and nobody seems to mind, too distracted by the allure of fun cheap American shopping.

And I don’t know where it will end. And that’s scary.

Tagged as: Americanization, Canada, Eatons, HBC, shopping, Target, Zellers