Zellers Commercial 2002

Zellers was a Canadian discount department retail chain and currently a brand name owned by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). Founded in 1931, it was based in Brampton, Ontario. Zellers was acquired by HBC in 1978 before closing in 2013.

A series of acquisitions and expansions allowed Zellers to reach its peak in the 1990s, with 350 stores across the country in 1999. However, fierce competition by Walmart Canada and an inability to adjust to the increasingly volatile retailing industry resulted in Zellers losing significant ground in the 2000s. At the same time, HBC's new owner NRDC Equity Partners was focusing on bolstering and re-positioning Zellers' sister chain, The Bay, with an upscale and fashion-oriented direction, and saw Zellers as a detriment to the turnaround.

In January 2011, HBC announced that it would sell the lease agreements for up to 220 Zellers stores to the US. chain Target for $1.825 billion. In turn, Target announced its intent to convert many of them to Canadian locations of Target, and re-sell the remainder to other parties such as Walmart Canada, resulting in their liquidation and eventual closure. While HBC retained 64 Zellers locations, it announced on July 26, 2012, that all of them would be liquidated and closed by March 31, 2013, due to their lack of profitability. After the chain ceased, HBC repurposed three Zellers-branded locations as liquidation outlets for The Bay (since renamed Hudson's Bay), with the last of those stores closed on January 26, 2020.

In August 2021, the Zellers brand was relaunched as a pop-up shop (store-within-a-store) exclusively at the Hudson's Bay store located in the Burlington Centre shopping mall.