Consumers Distributing, a Toronto-born retailer, had no products on display. Customers ordered from catalogues and watched a flash board while clerks fetched items. At its peak in the 1980s, it ran 450 stores and made over a billion dollars a year before Walmart and impatience killed it in 1996.
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Alright people under 35, let me introduce you to the weirdest, most Canadian store chain you have never heard of: Consumers Distributing. Now long before Amazon would ship you a cat-themed wine rack in 6 hours, Canadians were going to special stores, flipping through giant laminated paper catalogues, scribbling down product codes on little pieces of paper, and handing them to a clerk behind a counter that felt more like passport office than store. It was like filing your taxes to buy a blender. And then you'd wait. Maybe 5 minutes. Maybe 45. And if you were lucky, you would leave with the toaster that you wanted. Or at least the clerk's vague assurance that it might be in Canmore? Consumers Distributing started in Toronto in the late 1950s, and this part sounds made up, but I swear it's true: the stores had no shelves. No displays. You walked in and literally all you saw were half a dozen laminated catalogues. The real action happened in the back, in a warehouse that you never saw. By the 1980s, they had over 450 stores in Canada and the US, raking in over a billion dollars a year. That's billion with a B, back when that meant something. And that wasn't the weirdest part. To manage the chaos, they introduced the flash board. Basically electronic display panels usually mounted above the service counter, uh, designed to show you the status of your order. So once you handed your order form to the clerk, they would input your product codes into the system, your order would go into the queue, and there was a kind of drama to it. You know, like, would your order get filled? Uh, uh, was the VCR even in stock? Was it your lucky day or did someone ahead of you snagged the last one. Everyone stood around watching that board like it was a kino screen in a casino restaurant. And still, for a while, the model worked. It was cheaper. It was more efficient. If you squinted, it felt futuristic. Kind of like a low-tech Amazon minus the convenience. Or the inventory. By the early '90s, it started to crack. Consumers were tired of waiting. Consumers Distributing tried to fix it. They launched superstores. They even added real-time inventory and offered home delivery, but It was too late. Walmart had arrived. Zellers still had a pulse, and consumers made you queue like you were rationing butter during the war. By '96, it was over. They went bankrupt. And yet, they weren't wrong. Consumers Distributing saw the future. They just couldn't survive long enough to get there. And it was so Canadian, it hurt. Efficient, polite, and a little bit awkward.
I want value for the money! It's right in the book 'cause I work hard for it honey! It's right in the book we get value for the money cause Consumers' Bookie Is Right you'll find it all in the pages consumers branding pages because I work hard for the wages Consumers' Bookie Is Right we get value for the money— Value for the money! Value for the money cuz Consumers' Bookie Is Got Right In The Book!
