Whatever happened to…

… Consumers Distributing?

From the Padlet, this suggestion from Jennifer King.

Consumers Distributing
My brother and I loved going there with my mom! Ahhh…the smell of the newest Panasonic electronics! Flipping those page-protected pages! 

Wow, this takes me back! In the day, catalogues were the way that we ordered things from everywhere. In our small rural town, there was a Simpsons-Sears outlet but it did take a week or so from ordering to receipt of product. We could drive to Stratford and the Consumers Distributing store there. The concept was the same – you didn’t actually see the product on shelves, you filled out an order form and someone went into the back and picked up your order from inventory, if it was in stock.

The archive mentioned in the video is located here.

Later, at university, we did a spin on that. To kill time as poor university students, we’d wander the Eaton or Simpsons store to look at the product first hand. But, it always seemed to be a bit cheaper to go to Consumer Distributing (or Consumers, as we called it) in downtown Waterloo or to the Westmount mall and get it from Shop-Rite. Later, when we moved to Essex County, there was a Consumers store in the west end of Windsor. Sadly, like all good things, these stores came to an end and are not around anymore.

I’m smiling at Jennifer’s description of the protected pages in the catalogue! You would indeed flip your way through there looking at the products. I don’t recall them as being anywhere clean! Bizarrely enough, as I walked the dog and wrote this post in my head this morning, I could remember two specific products from there – my first clock radio, a Panasonic with flipcards for the digits and an RCA colour television for my parents for their 25th anniversary.

For a Sunday morning, do you have any memories of Consumers Distributing? Please share them in the comments below.

• First, for all my English experts, have I mastered the apostrophe in these store names? I’ve seen them included but it seems to me that there isn’t any at all in any of these stores
• Do you remember any specific purchases you made from Consumers?
• Consumers Distributing and Shop-Rite had very distinctive colours – do you remember them?
• Can you remember slipping and sloshing through a tile floor at Christmas time due to the heavy traffic bringing in snow and slush?
• Like Jennifer (I’ve always loved her style), I felt Consumers was the place to go for electronic products at the time. They seemed to have a more modern and complete collection, at least in their catalogue
• Over the past while, I think we’ve all ordered online. What would you consider today’s equivalent to Consumers Distributing?
• Would their business model have survived in our COVID lockdown days?

As always, please dig through your memories and share some of them with us below.

If you have an idea for a future post like Jennifer did, please reach out with it to me directly or via the Padlet.