Stedmans V&S (or V&S for short) is a Canadian variety discount department store chain.
7-539: Stedmans operates its stores mainly in smaller towns and cities in Canada. The chain's stores today are comparable in size and merchandise offered to similar chains such as Fields , SAAN (now defunct) and The Bargain! Shop , with a number of stores also offering such services as photo finishing, laminating, faxing and photocopying, and dry cleaning drop-off. The first store, in Brantford Ontario, started as
14-484: A restaurant named The Copper Grill. From about the 1960s into the 1980s, though, many Stedmans stores were also located in larger cities. Those stores were similar in size to those of the Kmart and Woolco chains, with a large selection of merchandise; those locations often served as anchor tenants for suburban shopping centers and malls . Today, the remaining Stedman's V&S stores are independently owned, and there
21-534: A stationery store in 1907. During the 1950s and 1960s, there were over 1000 Stedmans and affiliated stores in Canada. The affiliated stores were privately owned variety stores operating under different names, though purchasing through Stedmans. During the late 1960s through the 1970s, there were several stores across Canada that were "combination" stores (that is, Stedmans and its sister chain Macleods Hardware) in operation. Some stores today still contain
28-629: Is no larger purchasing company. Fields (department store) Fields Stores Ltd. is a Canadian discount store company owned by FHC Holdings, with 67 locations in British Columbia , Alberta , Saskatchewan , Manitoba , and the Northwest Territories . The first Fields store was established in Vancouver in 1950 by the chain's founders, Joseph Segal and Saul "Sonny" Wosk. From there, Fields grew to eight stores by
35-529: The Zellers chain in 1976. Zellers would reverse the takeover a few months later and make Fields and Marshall Wells into its subsidiaries, all of which were partly acquired by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in 1978, and fully owned by 1981. Marshall Wells was sold by HBC in 1985, and Fields was moved from a Zellers subsidiary into a full division of HBC in 1988. In contrast with the much larger Zellers stores,
42-755: The Fields division was intended to be a small format, extreme value retail chain for rural and urban Canadian communities. Hudson's Bay Company announced an aggressive expansion strategy for Fields, adding 53 new stores in 2006–2007, with another 35 locations planned for 2008. Over the next several years, HBC planned on opening around 800 new stores across Canada. New locations featured the successful Fields "Mini Mart" concept. In December 2011, HBC announced that Fields stores would cease operations, beginning February 2012 in Ontario where 26 stores closed. The remaining 141 stores were also announced to close in phases throughout
49-487: The time it opened a store at Capilano Mall in North Vancouver in 1968, continuing to expand across British Columbia into the 1970s with the acquisitions of several regional retailers (including several small HBC stores in smaller towns). In 1972, Fields purchased a subsidiary chain of hardware stores called Marshall Wells, and after further expansion into Alberta and Saskatchewan, it acquired majority ownership of
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