So it seems like after a ~15 year run up in Canada, Lowe's has decided to sell off its Canadian operations to private equity firm Sycamore Partners and exit the Canadian market. Apparently the stores are still remaining open for now but it wouldn't surprise me that a few low traffic stores would be shut down shortly after. The Lowe's brand is also apparently going to be replaced with the RONA brand. RONA was a Canadian chain of hardware stores that was acquired by Lowe's in 2016 after a failed attempt in 2012.

I suppose Home Depot and to a lesser extent Canadian Tire and Home Hardware were already well entrenched here when Lowe's opened up so I think they always struggled to compete against the other hardware stores, especially Home Depot which was more or less a direct competitor and in my area had better locations compared to Lowe's. There were a few missteps in choosing locations too. The most notable being a since closed Lowe's location here was strangely taken over from a old mall department store location (Zellers then Target) and it was strange to see a Lowe's in a two story store. I suppose the odd two floor layout, the smaller square footage which meant a limited selection and strange location choice (Canadian Tire in the same mall, Home Depot 2.5 miles away) pretty much doomed that location from the start. It's now a computer parts retailer.

Still kind of a shame to see the Lowe's name go, when they first opened in Canada back in the end of 2007 they had arguably the best selection of lighting and electrical items out of all the hardware stores here. In terms of lighting, they had 175w MV yardlights, 100w MV mini yardlights, and Cooper 100w HPS commerical grade wallpacks along with 70w HPS tallpacks and 100w and 150w HPS yardlights. They also had a pretty decent selection of 400w and under HID lamps at the time too and I think were the few retailers here that stocked F96T8 lamps.

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Here in the US, Lowes doesn’t seem to be doing great either. Declining foot traffic, increased competition with Home Depot, and a failed attempt to resurrect the now defunct OSH chain. I’m not surprised they’re exiting Canada, which I’ve heard is a tough market for most retailers. I’d say here it probably isn’t the end of the world for them yet, but worse case scenario they become a regional chain.

Hmm I suppose it makes sense then they're exiting Canada then. I've speculated myself that Lowe's here was having trouble integrating the RONA chain into Lowe's Canada operations. To this day the two chains still operate pretty distinctly with separate websites and store branding. The fact that RONA was based on French speaking Quebec and Lowe's was in English Canada probably didn't help things either. Ironically in 2016 it was speculated that the big box RONA stores would get rebranded to Lowe's and the RONA name only kept for the smaller stores.

Hopefully Lowe's still maintains somewhat of a presence in the US, even as a regional chain it would be a shame to see it go under.

Yeah, a lot of successful US retailers don't seem to translate well to Canada for some reason. Even WalMart struggled with Sam's Club here and decided to close them and there's also the notorious Target Canada closure. They lasted barely two years. Bass Pro seems to be doing ok but with a pretty limited presenc.