Since we moved to Toronto, I’ve been to Canadian Tire about 3,487 times (give or take a thousand or so)…
We needed:
Garbage cans… got em.
Ceiling hooks… yep
Gardening supplies… check
Magazines… yep
Clock radio… had it.
Filled up the car with gas… and got Canadian Tire money back
Cleaning supplies… tons of em
Caulking gun… yep
and the list goes on and on…
And, even better - since the neighborhood Canadian Tire is near Toronto’s Gay Village, it’s FILLED with good looking eye candy…
Just don’t ask the cashiers or associates a question… they’re usually teenagers who don’t seem to care about anything… or are as dumb as a box of rocks… I think there must be an IQ/age test… you have to score low on both or either to get hired…
You just reminded me…back in the mid-to-late 70s, when some friends and I would spend Saturdays fixing up our beaters, we’d often go to Canadian Tire for auto parts. It was great fun to ask the kid behind the parts desk for a water pump for a '68 VW Bug–and watch him try to look it up in his parts book!
Bugs in those days had no water pumps–they were air-cooled.
For those items, I would go to a Home Depot or a Lowes. I think I’ve seen all of those in Home Depot. You might be able to find some of them in a Target but for things like a decent light fixture and decent tools you are stuck with going to a Home Depot.
I’d rather have 100% of the male market than 30% male and 30% female. This is the whole point to niche marketing - to target your product line at a specific demographic group to meet a demand not being met by the more generalized stores like Wal-Mart.
When I need a flashlight, I go to Canadian Tire first. There’s a Wal-Mart right down the block from it, and they’re both the same distance from my house. Wal-Mart has flashlights too, but Canadian Tire will have a wall of them. I can indulge my geeky desires and examine the minutae of 3 LED vs 5 LED and play around with a bunch of them. This makes me a more satisfied buyer. I like knowing that I made an intelligent choice after examining some alternative products and evaluating them. If I bougth at Wal-Mart, I’d have to accept that I chose the flashlight simply because there were no alternatives, or very few.
And here’s the beauty of Canadian Tire and stores like it: When I read a Canadian tire catalog looking for a tennis racket, I’ll probably flip through other pages containing camping gear, tools, and auto supplies. The next time I need one of those items, I’ll just automatically know where I can get it, and that’s Canadian Tire.
That’s why, when I bought some new wiper blades for my car, I went to Canadian Tire to get them, even though there’s a PartSource auto supply closer to our house. When I decided I needed them, I automatically knew I could get the ones I needed at Canadian Tire. So I just hopped in the car and drove over and got them.
That’s how a niche store captures a market. The value they add is increased selection, increased convenience in that it’s more likely that people in this niche will need several items that the store happens to stock. And they probably get a higher percentage of impulse buys. Lord knows, I find it almost impossible to walk out of a Canadian Tire without a bag of something, even if I didn’t find what I went there looking for. I’ll be on the way out and pass a rack of flashlights, or I’ll remember while I’m there that I’m low on AA batteries and butane.
In Wal-mart, I can walk past a mile of shelves of women’s clothing and towels on my way to the little hardware section, without ever spontaneously deciding I could use a new set of hand towels or a soap dispensor. I’m much more likely to walk out of Wal-Mart empty-handed if I don’t find what I was looking for in the first place.
PartSource is Canadian Tire, except that it’s just the parts department. Same company, same parts, same prices.
And I wouldn’t really say Canadian Tire is niche marketing.
What I do find interesting is that Canadian Tire is kicking Walmart’s ass. See herefor example. Very strong growth in the face of Walmart’s expansion into Canadian markets. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because Canadian Tire not only has decent prices, but also sells stuff that isn’t crap.
Just to back up what Sam said, I can state that on at least one occasion, I’ve come out of Canadian Tire with the following:
– An alternator for a 1990 2.5L four-cylinder Jeep/Chrysler engine.
– A pair of CSA-approved work boots.
– A selection of D and AA batteries.
– A pair of needlenose pliers.
– A pair of safety glasses.
Along the way, I admired the shotguns and rifles, I had a look at the bikes (hey, I might be able to remember how to ride one), and I checked out the softball equipment.
Wal-Mart? Pffft! Not if I have to go through Ladies Wear and Children’s Wear and Toyland and Groceries just to find what’s on my list (see above). Canadian Tire doesn’t have to appeal to women–it appeals to Canadian men (as Sunspace mentioned), and does very well chasing that demographic.
I don’t know what the precise term is for it. It’s not niche marketing in the sense that an organic foodstore or Radio Shack is, but it’s more targeted than Wal-mart.
Radio Shack is a good example of a franchise existing despite the existence of big box retailers like Best Buy and Future Shop. Radio Shack thrives because of location (it goes where the box boxes aren’t - inside malls), but also for the same reasons I mentioned regarding Canadian Tire. They get a lot of cross-shopping, and they’ve positioned themselves to be the first store you think of when you need certain things - cables, electronic doo-dads, adapters, batteries, chargers, all that kind of stuff. Then they cross-market to them while they’re in the store or as they read the catalog.
That sounds about right. When I buy anything at Wal-Mart that’s not a name brand, I always get that feeling that I’m ‘buying down’ - choosing inferior quality for low price. Canadian Tire, not so much. Even their own branded merchandise is usually decent quality or better.
I recently bought a set of tires from Canadian Tire. The guy at the service desk wasn’t hesitant at all about telling me that the CT house brand of tires was actually made by Goodyear. (At least, the ones I bought.)
As for the OP–maybe Canadian Tire never made headway in the US due to the “Buy American” crowd? (Their loss, IMHO.)
Don’t assume tires “made by Goodyear” are all the same quality.
They also make Kelly-Springfield, and I suspect you can either A) buy a new Goodyear or B) buy a new Kelly-Springfield, and for less money get a tire made with the same technology Goodyear was using in the late '80s for tires.
Still, Goodyear is a company operated by Americans, living in the most lawsuit-prone environment on earth, so one imagines that Canadian Tire has more or less the same QC on their assembly process as Goodyear does on the rest of its line.
I have always wonderd about branded vs, non-branded tires. Some pretty pricey tires (like Pirelli) turn out to be pretty mediocre-while "send brands’ like MOHAWK, COOPER, seem to make decent quality tires. i guess the biggest tire swindle were those “directional” tread pattern tires-you could only use a LH tire on the car’s left side-they didn’t do squat!
That’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw the words “Canadian Tire”.
When I lived in Yellowknife, the bulk of my shopping (non-food) was done at Canadian Tire (and Mark’s Work Wearhouse). We also had a Wal-Mart, but I preferred to keep my money in Canada.
When I left YK for Alberta, I had to get rid of a lot of stuff due to the cost of shipping. With my Canadian Tire money and a whole whack given to me from a family friend, I bought sheets, towels, a coffee maker, broom, mop, dustpan, cleaning supplies and dishes to outfit my new place.
My husband equates Canadian Tire with Western Tire and Auto, for those who may be familiar with it. I’ve never heard of it.
A good point, but I have a minor nitpick… though RS has franchises, the vast majority (I think 90%+) is corporately owned.
They make most of their money from the accessory sales, rather than the “big ticket” items, though the sales guys certainly want to sell the big ticket items as their core (commission).
As a manager (I ran the Salem MA store for a while in the early 90s), I loved selling lots of little accessories, and parts… they had the BIG margins. The previous manager was into selling PCs, and made big dollar sales every month, and though I either beat or came close to his monthly figures every month, my gross margin was HUGE, as I had a customer base that I had built up over a couple of years of working as a RS salesman to the HAM (Amateur radio) community… they buy lots of cable, connectors, adaptors, batteries, and parts all at high margin. Managers in my district would send their HAMs to my store, because I knew my stuff, and could help them with a design, or bodge together a solution to an odd electronic problem, using only the parts available to me. (I went to school for EE, and am a HAM myself).
They are a perfect niche store, doing well as a corporation. They do pay the managers in the small store next to nothing though, for WAY too many hours… .which is why I left. I could make more per hour flipping burgers, with far less calls from security in the middle of the night.
The running joke at RS was that where you find a RS in New England, there is a Papa Gino’s within 500yds.
Canadian Tire (CT, “Crappy Tire”) generally has the obscure electrical, household or automotive item I am looking for, reasonably priced. They have good specials and an intelligent choice of items. Most small Canadian towns have a “Crappy Tire”, I’d have to drive for an hour to go to the Home Depot. Home Depot is more expensive, and while bigger, this offers no advantage if the thing I need is at Canadian Tire as well, and cheaper. Canadian Tire does a mediocre but servicable job of car repair; small town mechanics might overcharge more and be less reliable (even though CT has mixed record in this regard). In the last year, I’ve used CT to fix the car, buy: hockey equipment, gardening tools, camping stuff, weightlifting gloves, travel generator to use foreign electrical outlets on my laptop, batteries, car equipment, mousetraps, kitchen knives, etc. Nothing major, but in our small town these items would be more expensive or harder to find at Zellers. Wal-Mart is slightly cheaper but has a poor amd less intelligent selection of some of these things. I think everyone buys hockey equipment at CT!
I have for many years seen CT publically advertise a “CT money” rebate rate of 4%. I don’t think the rebate is secret, or more complicated than that.
According to a CT executive in 2000, Motomaster tires are made by all of the major tire manufacturers based on 2-3 year old models, after the OEMs have released new versions or lines of those tires (so, for instance, today’s 2006 Motomaster SuperAmazingLuxo Winter Tire might be Goodyear’s 2004 IceCutter9000). I have no idea if that’s true, though.
Canadian Tire did try to venture into the U.S. in the 80’s by buying the aforementioned White’s. That experiment failed dismally, and they have made no serious forays back into the American market since.
With regard to CT’s auto service, I’m told that in parts of Canada, especially the Maritimes and Newfoundland, CT is often the best place to get your car serviced. They have much better prices than smaller outfits can manage, and attract the best mechanics because they pay better. Again, hearsay, but seems logical.