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Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

And that's a pretty good description of Canadian retail. Most Canadian retailers just charge what US mail-order retailers do, plus typical shipping and duties.

There are a lot of soft targets in Canadian retail. The Hudson's Bay Company is one of them.

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I actually wrote a blog post on this when I was purchasing shoes:

https://gaiser.io/amazon-is-winning-as-everyone-else-isnt-tr...

I need wide shoes. I could not find a place to buy wide running shoes besides Amazon at the usual places. My typical shoe buying places did not have a way to search for wides online.

I admit that I didn't really check all that exhaustively, but past experience has taught me that other retailers besides Amazon are not worth the clicks.

Yeah - it's frustrating how bad Canadian retail is still. I had an experience a few years ago with Canadian Tire where I chose in-store pick-up for an online purchase. The people at the store looked at me like I was from Mars. They didn't have the item in stock, and the manager actually told me that

1. he couldn't refund me because it was two separate computer systems (a lawyer would have told him tough sh*t - you're still the same company), and

2. I should do a credit-card charge-back to get my money back!

It's been years since, and I'm trying them again now. I ordered a set of dumbbells yesterday and ... still no email to come pick up my in-stock dumbbells.

BTW - I have wide feet too. If you're looking for running shoes, ASICS is good (this is the brand I always wear), and I've heard New Balance is pretty wide too. I can't wear Nike or Reebok for this reason.

Wow. And, my order for the dumbbells was...cancelled! They sold my item to someone and cancelled my order.

Canadian retail is still such a cluster-f*ck.

Yep lol. This has happened to my Dad too.

I have wide feet and I buy all my runners through the New Balance store. Never an issue.

Ten years ago I tried to buy a blazer in Downtown Vancouver.

I could not find one larger than a size 38 without going to Mr. Big and Tall, where the blazers would fit my size 48 chest but had enough extra room around the waist to store a couple of toddlers.

I had the same experience with width of glasses frames, with shirts, and with any good that fell outside of a single standard deviation from the average.

There's a paper where researchers compare the "average" sizes for human factors to individual people and discover that people who fit all the averages are vanishingly rare. Almost everybody is outside a deviation for at least one characteristic. I wish I'd bookmarked it.

Canadian retailers just stock within the one deviation and shrug. I specifically went to the Bay for that blazer.

It was a US military study for fighter plane cockpit ergonomics. They had accidentally designed cockpits to be suboptimal for all pilots.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight...

From talking with Canadians, are folks happy with that?

Target didn't stay very long in Canada.

It seems every store has a "Canadian alternative" that's just pricier and has less product. I always hear about cross border shopping being done in the US to bring back goods in Canada but never the other way around. Even for cars it seems the same car will sell for way much north of the border.

Target made two mistakes. The first was making a deal to lease all the former Zellers locations, which was too many to handle at the start. The second, was to rely on their US-based logistics software that wasn't capable of handling multi-country inventory and tracking (like different currencies).

I loved Target. As a single dad, I loved the variety of kids clothes they had. They still carried the brands that Zellers did but they had their own from the US too. I was so disappointed when I heard they were leaving. I didn’t believe it at first but sadly it turned out to be true.

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