Top 3 Canadian Grocers for 2014 - By the numbers and by actual store visits by a 'Legendary investor'  Legendary investor Peter Lynch said it best: “Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst’s job”. With that in mind, what is the one thing we all do every week? We head over to the nearest grocery store and load our shopping cart with the essentials for the coming days. Day in day out, these stores take in a meaningful percentage of our hard-earned cash, so why not try and get some income from this essential service? 1st Place - Metro, 2nd Place - Sobey's owned by Empire Co., and 3rd place - the biggest retailer in Canada - Loblaw Companies. (Source fool.ca)

Hudson's Bay Corp. may sell some stores real estate to fund remodel's & Saks Fifth Avenue's Canadian Entry  HBC owns several massive Canadian flagships, with a combined worth into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Last January it sold its 850,000 square foot Queen Street Toronto flagship (and adjacent office tower) to Cadillac Fairview for $650 million. Cadillac Fairview, in turn, merged Hudson's Bay with the Toronto Eaton Centre, creating Canada's second-largest mall. Saks Fifth Avenue will occupy 150,000 square feet within the Hudson's Bay building as a result, and similar deals could happen in other Canadian cities. (Source retail-insider.com)

U.S. "invasion" causing more heat for Canadian brands - the pressure is on!
Bob Kirke, executive director, Canadian Apparel Federation, said there has been a plateau of U.S. retailers coming into Canada, except on the luxury side, in part because of Target’s costly failure. “We don’t have a marketplace to support that many more stores. Our market is only so big – it’s California,” said Kirke. The entry of Walmart into the Canadian marketplace in 1994 was a seismic shift, said Kirke. In 2004, the elimination of import quotas opened up what had been a restricted market in Canada. After the financial crisis of 2008, which started in the U.S., American retailers began looking to Canada as a source of growth. Harris said Canadian players don’t have the same deep pockets that global companies like H&M have to invest in stores to make sure they keep up with the times. "I believe there are at least three or four retailers who are hanging on by their fingertips and will go out of business after the New Year,” said Harris. “Most of them will survive, but for how long and how profitable will they be? Will they ever be as profitable as they were 20 years ago? Absolutely not.” (Source thestar.com)

Small formats in future for Walmart Canada? - You are where your leader takes you...  With the number of discount stores suitable for conversion dwindling, Walmart is again poised to follow the pattern of growth unfolding in the U.S. where the emphasis increasingly has shifted to smaller stores operating under the banners of Neighborhood Market, Walmart Express and Walmart To Go. The hiring of former Delhaize CEO Dirk Van den Berghe supports the thesis that Canada soon will see the development of alternative formats. None of the stores he led looked anything like the units Walmart operates in Canada which are massive by comparison. Even the company’s traditional Delhaize supermarkets average only about 20,000-sq.-ft., roughly half the size of a typical Walmart Neighborhood Market which is regarded as a small format in the U.S. (Source retailingtoday.com)

DNA could help solve 5-year-old Toronto pharmacy robbery case  Ryan Straker was found guilty Wednesday afternoon in a Jefferson County courtroom of an armed robbery at the Toronto Apothecary Pharmacy in November 2009. He will be sentenced next Tuesday morning. Earlier in the day, after hearing from two expert witnesses with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the defense asked the judge to dismiss the aggravated robbery charge, saying the state hadn’t provided enough evidence. Jefferson County Common Pleas Judge David Henderson overruled, partly because of testimony heard Wednesday morning on how DNA from the hood and cuffs of a sweatshirt hit in a DNA database, matching it to Straker. (Source wtov9.com)

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