If you grew up in Ontario in the 1970s or 1980s, Towers might be one of those names that sits just at the edge of memory. You know it was there. You might even be able to picture the sign. And then, at some point, it was a Zellers. That's more or less what happened.
Towers was never as famous as Eaton's or Simpsons, and it doesn't have the cult following Zellers does. But for more than two decades it was part of Ontario's shopping map, and its story says a lot about how Canadian discount retail was stitched together.
The story
Towers grew out of the grocery business. The Oshawa Group ran Food City supermarkets and was the biggest wholesale supplier to independent IGA grocers in Canada. In the 1960s it decided to sell more than food.
According to the International Directory of Company Histories, Oshawa made its move in January 1966, buying 75 per cent of a six-store Ontario chain called Rite-Way Department Stores and taking over its management. A year later it bought the rest of Rite-Way and also acquired Allied Towers Merchants Ltd., another department store chain. The two were combined under one management team, and Towers became the name Ontario shoppers knew.
The chain fit neatly with the rest of Oshawa's business. The company announced plans to put Kent Drug pharmacies inside new Towers stores. In 1968 it bought Rockower of Canada, which ran the men's and boys' departments in 26 Towers locations. Oshawa also had an interest in shopping centres that paired a Towers with a Food City supermarket, putting groceries and general merchandise side by side.
At one point Oshawa was running 39 Towers department stores in Ontario. In Quebec, the chain went by a different name: Bonimart.
Why people remember it
Part of the reason Towers feels fuzzy for so many people is the way it ended. It wasn't shut down in a single dramatic moment. It was sold, and its stores took on another name.
blogTO, looking back at Toronto's lost discount shops, counts Towers among the city's bargain fixtures of the 1980s. It belongs to a whole family of Ontario chains that once seemed permanent: Woolco, Kmart, Consumers Distributing and, for a long time, Zellers itself.
There's a fun corporate footnote, too. The same Oshawa Group that built Towers also owned half of Consumers Distributing, the catalogue showroom chain, before selling that stake in 1978. For a while, a grocery wholesaler had a hand in two very different kinds of Ontario discount shopping.
What happened?
In 1990 Zellers, by then majority-owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, bought Towers, including the Bonimart stores in Quebec. The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Canadian Press both date the deal to 1990, and blogTO notes that the Toronto locations became Zellers stores.
That's why so many people remember Towers mostly as the store that used to be there before Zellers. For a lot of shoppers, the building, the parking lot and the location stayed familiar. The name over the door was what changed.
Zellers didn't last forever either. HBC sold most of its Zellers leases to Target in 2011, and most Zellers stores closed in 2013. The Zellers name has since been revived by new owners, with stores opening in Edmonton in 2025 and Toronto in 2026. We haven't found any sign of the Towers name coming back.
Quick facts
- Parent company: The Oshawa Group, a grocery wholesaler and supermarket operator
- How it came together: Oshawa bought into Rite-Way in 1966, then bought the rest of Rite-Way and Allied Towers Merchants in 1967
- Size: At one point 39 stores in Ontario
- Quebec name: Bonimart
- Fate: Bought by Zellers in 1990 and converted to Zellers stores
