I’m going to take a little detour from the vacation posts and instead talk about Sears. I’m not interested in discussing what went wrong for the once-mighty retailer in terms of a retail case study, but rather looking at the history of the chain and one store in particular.
The history of Sears in Canada goes back to 1953. A year before, Canadian retailer Simpson’s created a joint partnership with Sears, Roebuck and Company from the US. The result was Simpsons-Sears, which was a fixture on the Canadian retail landscape well into the 1980s.
Any child of a certain age remembers when the Sears Christmas Wish Book would arrive in the mail and then sitting down with a pen and circling all of the toys he/she wanted for Christmas. Today’s youth will never understand just how magical those days were as building an Amazon wishlist just doesn’t have the same charm.
While those warm memories of childhood remain, I am guilty of not doing my part to keep Sears as a viable company. Prior to the visit which inspired this post, I think the last time I had been inside a Sears store was in 2012.
Speaking of visiting Sears, that is exactly what Emily and I did last Thursday evening. Our target was the Sears in located in North Hill Mall. We had slightly different goals, with Emily’s being to see if there were any great deals as part of the liquidation proceedings and mine was to document the store.
The history of this Sears store goes back to 1958. North Hill Shopping Centre has the distinction of being the first shopping mall in Calgary. It was originally constructed as an open-air mall with a canopy covering the area between the stores. The Simpsons-Sears was a free-standing building located on the east end. This store remained relatively unchanged, even when the mall underwent a massive renovation in 1973 which converted it into an enclosed shopping centre. At the time of its construction in 1958, this would have been a very suburban location, whereas today it is practically inner city. The location has been a target for redevelopment for quite some time, with plans announced back in 2014 that the location was going to be converted into highrise condominiums.
On the evening of our visit, the store was a bit of a disaster inside. Customers have been rooting through the merchandise like vultures picking over the carcass of a freshly killed deer. It was very symbolic of how the once-proud pillar of Canadian retail has become a mere shadow of its former self.
While we may make another visit to see what is left when the discounts get deeper, we both realize this may have very well been the last time we ever set foot in a Sears. The name and the legacy will join other retail legends like Woolworth’s, Kresge, and Eaton’s which have disappeared.
With that, here are some shots from inside Sears:
The escalators inside Sears
Well, we know how well that worked out, don’t we?
A sad sight — this poor teddy bear sits alone inside the already-abandoned portrait studio
The wear on these door handles shows how much they have been used over the years
Stepping out through these doors into the parking lot one last time
Which long-gone retailer do you miss the most? Any memories of Sears you’d like to share? Comment below.
DanOCan 
Hey Dan, this is maybsunshine from the geocaching world, but that’s not how I found this. Wow, the feels for me on this post of yours. I ended up here after somehow ending up at a blog called the shopping mall museum which had a great 2011 post about North Hill and Chinook. In the early 90s I worked for several months at the WHSmith inside the Chinook Sears location, but that’s not where the bulk of my memories lie. I doubt Sears will ever leave my consciousness, or the North Hill location in particular; I’m an only child and during a certain era (summers and weekends during much of the 80s, especially) my late mom (gone almost 25 years now) and I shopped at North Hill more than a sane person would care to admit to. I’m talking, almost every day when we weren’t doing anything else. I knew this store like the back of my hand. There was an odd area on the south side of the second floor (up the elevator) that felt even odder as the place entered its final days. I wandered up there a couple more times near the end. Much earlier than that (because the restaurant was still there), there was an Australian guy named Rob who worked in the restaurant for I can’t guess how long, but probably not as long as what I would guess. I wonder if he wondered why we ate lunch there so often?
I have a few pictures somewhere too, I definitely remember taking one of just the closed portrait studio, but I have nothing as poignant as that bear photo. Yeesh!
I remember that view of the main floor coming down the escalator. I lived it hundreds of times. And that bathroom photo! It’s like I’m in there again. Once more, on top of who knows how many hundred other times. I suspect a little that I’m sounding like a crazy man, but I guess it is what it is. I don’t think I went into that bathroom once without wondering just a little about the slant of that mirror, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another like it. Also, for some reason that’s the only bathroom I remember in that store, did I somehow never go to the one that was presumably somewhere on the main floor? Maybe it’ll come to me.
I never made the connection of why that brick was there inside the mall, but it makes sense.
I don’t have any memories of it, but I know my dad worked in this store part-time in men’s wear for a while when he was in school, that probably would have been around 1974.
Anyway, wow. Just scratching the surface of my brain here, but “thanks for the memories”, as they say. Farewell, Sears. What’s it down to now, seven in the lower 48 and one in Puerto Rico?
LikeLike
Hi Wayne. Thank you so much for taking the time to share these memories. Sears and other places like Eatons, Kresge, and the like, were really core memories for a lot of us. I guess we can add The Bay to that list now too. Online shopping is certainly convenient but I lament how the moments we grew up with will not be memories for the generations that follow.
LikeLike