Zellers Scavenger Hunt

            For the “Box Store Scavenger Hunt” I chose to go to Zellers, essentially Canada’s version of Walmart, because it has everything from toys to groceries.  Once I entered the store, the first thing that I noted was that the shoppers and employees were both quite multicultural.  There was an even balance between Asians, Indians and Europeans and even the occasional African-American.  While the races were balanced, the ages were very similar.  Most of the shoppers were elderly or mothers with young children and the employees were almost all middle aged woman, probably working the job as supplementary income for their household.

            Having thoroughly creeped out both the staff and patrons of Zellers, I moved on to finding the clothing sections for plus-sized men and women.  In the men’s section there was no plus-sized section, but there was a much greater range in sizes than the woman's regular section.  The woman’s plus-size section was marked by a sign depicting a slightly heavier model standing beside the words “above average”.  It should be noted that the woman was not heavy enough to be considered overweight and probably would have never shopped in that section.  This led me to wonder if any of the signs in Zellers would show an overweight or over 60 person.  After searching the entire store, I found that there were no pictures of either and that every single model was white, excluding one young African-American boy.  I found this odd, because as I previously noted, the shoppers and staff were both very multicultural.

            Still searching for multicultural pictures, I went to the picture frame section.  There I finally found “filler pictures” of non-white people.  In these pictures, there were lots of multicultural friend groups, all 20 something’s having a great time sitting on couches and participating in various other group activities.  The family photos, however, consisted completely of all-white families, there were no multi-racial families, nor were there any families that consisted of other races.

  Having finally located photos of people of a non-European background, I moved on to the card section, in search of cards that were given to minorities (e.g. Hanukkah or Kwanzaa cards).  These were impossible to locate, even when we went to the specialty card store.  In fact, when one of the employees was asked whether they had Kwanzaa cards or not, they responded, “What’s Kwanzaa?”. Once again the stores had failed to be live up to Canada’s multicultural standards.  While still in the card section, I decided to check if we also failed in our sexual diversity.  After searching through two entire aisles of anniversary/ romantic cards, I was unable to locate a single card aimed at gays/lesbians.  In fact I was unable to even find a card that depicted an interracial relationship.  Almost every card that wasn’t ambiguous featured a straight, white couple.  The only exceptions were the occasional cards showing an African-American couples and other cards showing various animals holding hands.  By this time, I was growing frustrated at Zellers lack of diversity.

Hoping that perhaps they were saving their diversity for the children, I hurried over to the toy section of the store.  At first glance I was actually quite impressed, there was a fair mix of races.  Sure the dolls looked exactly the same, excluding colour, but there was a bit of change.  And then I went around the corner, and was hit by a wave of white dolls.  Every single doll in the entire aisle was white.  It was borderline ridiculous.  Going over to the boys section was slightly better.  There were no G.I. Joes, but there were WWE action figures.  There was a decent mixture of races, but once again all of the figures had almost exactly the same body shape.  Once again Zellers had let down Canada’s multicultural ideals.

            Giving Zellers one last chance at redemption, I searched for any aboriginal artwork or people.  I was able to locate a bottle of Lakota picturing an aboriginal Chief and a Canucks logo, which I believe is aboriginal artwork.  Besides those two objects, I was once again disappointed.  This pretty much summed up the diversity in Zellers, sure there was a feeble attempt here and there to show it, but it really wasn’t much.  If this experience taught me anything, its that companies believe that skinny, 20-30 year old, white people are the ideal choice for advertising and thus are the people we emulate the most.   Which says something about our society.

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