Strong local roots in retail expansion
Posted Jan 13, 2011 04:57:40 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
American retailer Target is doing more than buying its way into the Canadian market. It’s also buying its way into the history of Waterloo Region.
Target announced today that it will spend $1.83-billion to buy up the leasehold interests in up to 220 Zellers stores from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The roots of those Zellers stores can be traced back to Waterloo Region.
Founder Walter Zeller was born in 1890 on the family farm near Breslau and attended Riverbank School on Fountain Street in what is now Cambridge. Zeller’s family eventually moved to Berlin, now Kitchener, where he attended what is now Kitchener Collegiate Institute and got a part-time job as a stock boy.
Tom Reitz, Manager/Curator of the Waterloo Region Museum, says Zeller learned the retail trade by working for a number of department store chains here and in the U.S. He founded Zellers in 1928 with stores in London, St. Catharines, Fort William and Guelph.
Those first stores were quickly bought out by another retailer and Zeller returned to the U.S.
“Zellers as we know it today gets created early on in the Depression, in 1931,” Reitz recounts. “Zeller reopens his set of stores, chainwide, in 1932. And the first Zellers store in this region opens on September 30th, 1932.”
Walter Zeller was inducted into the Waterloo Region Hall of Fame in 1972 and a Zeller Foundation remains to this day.
Target says it’s too early to say which of the 220 Zellers stores will open under the Target banner.
