Up For Grabs
The complete disassembly of a department store
Back in May, my wife and I visited Canada for a week. I’ve mentioned it a few times here; we loved Niagara Falls, our favorite city was Montreal. (I wrote about Montreal here.)
In Toronto, we passed a Nordstrom department store going out of business. It wasn’t far from an outdoor food distribution table and a rowdy street music performance; I wondered if this was one of those stores citing (maybe exaggerating) rising urban disorder and shuttering its urban locations. It turns out, however, that Nordstrom was actually exiting the entire Canadian market. By this last June they were all closed.
Stores are interesting; the departments and the fixtures feel permanent. If a store is a small city, those details are like the buildings. And here they are, all up for grabs. Pretty much every last thing.
It feels like it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a store really, seriously liquidating everything. I remember liquidation sales from when I was a kid, and they were on a different level than the ones you often see today. I wrote about this a couple of years ago; my guess is that the internet has opened up more sales channels, and maybe that logistics is just more nimble today. You don’t have to offload as much stuff to the end consumer anymore.
But here, the merchandise was discounted pretty steeply, and—more interestingly to me—the fixtures, furniture, sculptures, and utilitarian items were all tagged, and priced at what are probably very fair prices for such things.
There’s no limitation on who buys this stuff; it won’t be another chain store with its own channels or style for these things. But it might go to small businesses. Or to regular people, for whom one of these items might just be a piece of furniture with a neat little story. There were a couple of pieces I could theoretically see using in our house. They’re very solid, too: built to withstand years of heavy use. Items for the commercial market—furniture, kitchen implements, small appliances like the waffle irons in hotels—are plain but very good.
The afterlives of commercial artifacts are probably longer and more interesting than their lives. Nordstrom only entered Canada in 2014; so these fixtures, if they’re the originals and if this store was one of the first to open, are under 10 years old. You can bet a lot of them will kick around spare rooms, garages, basements, church offices, and thrift stores for decades.
These things are always interesting to me: the assembly and disassembly of things, the lives and afterlives, the flow of details in an overall setting that remains the same. Someone else will occupy this store, I suppose. They’ll just have to buy their own furniture.
Related Reading:
The Curious Phenomenon of the Garden Superstore
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!
I have two rugged clothing racks that I bought from a Filene’s Basement liquidation sale many years ago. WAY more sturdy than the cheap ones from Target and I think they were $20 or $25 each.
I also have a few hand shopping baskets from Toys R Us that are handy for everything. I use them when picking veggies at my local farm and for loading and unloading my RV. Super strong!
I've seen the same thing at several Sears locations here in Annapolis over the years. First at the old Parole Plaza (it moved to the mall down the street), then when they closed at the mall. As a "tool guy" I loved it for the deep discounts ;-)