Canada

Canada’s economy experienced a sharp contraction in 2020, due to the COVID-19 crisis and an oil price shock. The economy is anticipated to witness strong recovery over the 2021-2022 period, driven by the widespread COVID-19 vaccine rollout and ...

Homeshopping held up relatively well in 2020, largely maintaining its key customer base comprising a mostly older demographic that still prefers to complete orders over the phone or via mail. Many of them are retirees whose income and other finances ...

Unlike for other modern grocery retailers and traditional grocery retailers, value sales through convenience stores declined in 2020. Even though convenience stores were still open as essential services during the COVID-19 lockdown, the positive ...

Snacking is a key theme that supports sales in vending. However, with consumers staying home most of the time and significantly reduced foot traffic in public and semi-captive environments such as airports, shopping malls and recreational centres ...

Variety stores, especially dollar stores, were more resilient than other mixed retailers were at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and throughout the year as more consumers were buying on a budget. In fact, two of the dollar store players – Dollar ...

The steady performance of discounters in recent years have been supported by an increasing number of value-conscious consumers, and the channel has rapidly expanded its customer base by offering higher-quality products at reasonable prices. Big ...

Warehouse clubs had a very strong performance during COVID-19, as consumers stockpiled and spent more time at home. Even though consumers reduced the frequency of their trips to warehouse clubs during the pandemic, they purchased more groceries per ...

COVID-19 drove more consumers online in 2020, leading to a surge in e-commerce sales by more than 10% over the previous year. According to Statistics Canada, both retail stores and pure internet players saw significant growth in online sales as ...

Electronics and appliance specialist retailers saw a significant drop in store sales due to the falling foot traffic during the lockdown, while their online sales continued to increase sharply. Overall sales of electronics and appliances were more ...

In 2020, only drugstores/parapharmacies and chemists/pharmacies had positive value growth rates, as other health and beauty specialist retailers suffered more from reduced demand during the COVID-19 lockdown period, when only stores offering ...

Direct selling was relatively resilient in 2020 as more people were motivated to make extra income by becoming independent sales consultants, which possibly offset the negative impact of a decrease in consumer purchasing power. According to the ...

Department stores were hit hard especially during the first two quarters of 2020, due to a sharp drop in tourism, reduced store traffic and declining discretionary spending. All of the leading department store brands saw double-digit value sales ...

As supermarkets have long been facing increased competition from fast-growing hypermarkets and intense price competition from discounters and warehouse clubs, its value growth has been slower than that of its competitors in recent years. However, ...

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many traditional grocery retailers were entering a phase of stagnant growth, as the channel is very mature and faces more competition from many different channels, such as variety stores and convenience stores. ...

Home and garden specialist retailers outperformed most other non-grocery specialists during the COVID-19 lockdown and in 2020 overall. Consumers were more willing to remodel, renovate or upgrade as they spent more time at home. Many people cancelled ...

As demand for online grocery was rising during the pandemic, Uber and DoorDash were among the delivery platforms that took the opportunity to launch grocery delivery services through mobile apps in 2020. Uber launched a grocery delivery service in ...

As one-stop shops for all necessities, hypermarkets benefited from consumers’ stockpiling behaviour during the first half of 2020. The only grocery retailing channel that performed (nearly) as well during the year was discounters, which also saw ...

Apparel and footwear specialist retailers faced several headwinds in 2020, including a declining consumer interest in once popular fast fashion and mid-market brands, closing down of shopping malls during COVID-19 as well as the decreasing consumer ...

Meal-kit delivery service continued to accelerate in 2020, further driven by stay-at-home measures during lockdown and foodservice closures and restrictions resulting from the pandemic. Apart from the strong performance of established online meal kit...

Most retailers in Canada suffered significantly due to the drop in foot traffic during COVID-19. The strong spike in e-commerce sales was not enough to offset the loss in stores during the lockdown, especially in department stores, leisure and ...