I think they've all ripped off Littlewoods.

Me neither apart from some rather nice ceramic solar lights. The US ones sell No 7 cosmetics.

Quite, after all the furore I was expecting - well - something other than what was, as you say, a glorified Littlewoods.

More BHS i think.

One just opened near us. I haven't been into it yet but it surely can't be any more vile than the Zellers it replaced.

It's better than Zellers because it's clean inside. Zellers always seemed like Canadian Tyre to me, dirty, narrow aisles, Chinese tat disassembling itself inside the shop, staff that lack the language skills to work for Tim Horton's and always a mob of angry people having their returns refused.

You're forgetting the aisles of gourmet foodstuffs.

Another example of how "the same thing" can be completely different across Canada.

We had two Zellers stores and both were spotless. A near complete lack of customers had a lot to do with it.

They must have been a "front" for something. U.N.C.L.E HQ or something.

Seriously. One of them had a small 'restaurant' and there were always more 'diners' than customers looking around the store.

It was right by Sobeys, though, so it was sometimes worth a look and the odd purchase - I bought a great pair of 'deck' type shoes for $3 - before grocery shopping.

Our Zellers had a diner. It was a very popular meeting point for the oldies and probably the only part of the store that is missed.

We went into the store when it was being liquidated. They were flogging everything, including the shop fittings. I got quite a nice shirt for peanuts.

Zellers was the place to go buy the 1kg British Cadburys Dairy Milk bars at Christmas. Aside from that I'd no more set foot in the place willingly than I would Wallymart. That Canada is getting excited about Target coming says a lot about the state of Canadian retail and Canada itself. "Look, world, we've arrived! We have Target stores now!"

One good thing about Wallyworld (apart from the fact that it has started to sell some decent foodstuffs) is that it has put pressure on the big supermarket chains. The deep discount stores are brill. Apart from a few things we can only get at the high-end stores, we now shop at Maxi (Loblaws-Lite) or Super C (Metro-Lite). We can get almost everything we need there and it's a bloody sight cheaper than going to the headline stores.

The deep discount stores have the added bonus of being where immigrants go. They have a far greater selection of effnic stuff than the snazzy places.

I beg to differ on that. If you want to see effnic people throwing fruit and veg at each other then No Frills is unsurpassed. If you want an unhygenic blend of chicken and fish then T&T (a discount division of Loblaws) can provide many things that smell like summer in Chinatown and are unidentifiable by shape or consistency. If, however, you want a huge range of quality provisions from the four corners of the earth then the market is the place; just don't look too closely at the price tags.

Target are awful place's, so are, Walmart, Costco, and all the other dives that Canada call's a store. Lets face it most stores in Canada are just awful, drab, tired, dull places. I dont think they have ever heard of mechandising to appeal to the customer. Make's me depressed every time I go into one. Which is why I spend my money getting things shipped here from other countries.

All the aisles in our local fresh food market now seem to be clogged full of trinket stalls selling things like driftwood wind chimes or tie-died boomerangs. Its most off putting when you want to pop in and out quickly to get something nice for your tea.

I was referring to packaged foods, not fresh stuff.