City’s new MEC store reflects changing trends, manager says
Edmonton’s latest MEC store hopes to rope in extra customers with a wider assortment of clothing and bicycles as well as traditional climbing, skiing and camping equipment.
MEC, formally known as Mountain Equipment Co-op, last weekend closed its original Edmonton location at 102 Avenue and 124 Street and moved about six blocks north to a $14-million two-storey outlet at 119 Street and 104 Avenue, in the Brewery District.
“The old store wasn’t meeting the needs of the roughly 250,000 (members) in the Edmonton region,” store manager Craig Binch said Tuesday during a tour, adding MEC doesn’t own the building it is vacating and it’s for sale.
The new 3,800-square-metre flagship store, holding a grand opening Sunday, is almost double the size of the old one and slightly larger than the other local outlet in South Edmonton Common.
This allows the 165 staff — 45 more than at the former location — to offer more selection and expand such increasingly popular areas as children’s products and bicycles, where customers will be able to ride on rollers to test bikes that can cost up to $10,000.
There are almost 12,000 items, 14 per cent more than before.
There’s a treadmill for runners to try out shoes, a community meeting room, and a wide range of sleeping bags, technical shorts, stoves, climbing ropes, fleece, standup paddle boards, dog harnesses and backpack dice sets for which MEC is famous.
Canadians use the outdoors differently than they did when the Vancouver-based co-op, founded in 1971, came to Edmonton 19 years ago, Binch said.
“People typically don’t do the long trips they did, the two, three week backpacking trips …. But they’re doing things more intensely, like harder climbing routes and canoe trips.”
Factors influencing this change include an aging population, busier lives and the popularity of action cameras athletes can use to record their feats, he said. MEC is focusing more on areas such as road-running shoes, car camping equipment and lifestyle clothing worn on the street that isn’t aimed at the hard-core wilderness enthusiast, he said.
Christy Soholt, a tenter and boater who dropped in with her two young children, described the new location as “amazing” and thinks it will help make the Brewery District a shopping destination.
She said she was impressed that there’s no parking charge at the new store.
Binch said there was a fee at the old location to help pay for maintenance and ensure stalls weren’t clogged with drivers going to other buildings, but many people complained. Soholt said it deterred her from shopping at the old store.
Although online sales across the country have grown larger than any single outlet, people still want to touch products, particularly if they need fitting or cost a lot, Binch said.