Liquor Stores updating store decor, staff training
EDMONTON — The Liquor Depot’s newly opened store here boasts a 34-tap growler bar filled with local and seasonal craft beers.
There’s a vintage wine cellar, a modern, well-lit decor with bright colours and trained staff ready to offer advice on your wine purchase.
In short, it bears little resemblance to the Liquor Depots to which customers have grown accustomed in the 21 years since liquor sales were privatized in Alberta — a fact Stephen Bebis, president and CEO of parent company Liquor Stores N.A. readily acknowledges.
“We felt that our stores were 1990s and we wanted to bring them into this decade,” said Bebis.
The Edmonton-based company remodelled a dozen stores last year mostly in Alberta, with another 10 locations on tap for renovations this year.
“We’d like to do 10 to 15 a year and it’s going to take us some time to get through them, but we’re focusing on the ones that need it the most,” said Bebis.
The retailer has 175 stores in Alberta alone. Overall, the 246-store empire includes locations in British Columbia, Alaska and Kentucky under banners including Liquor Depot, Liquor Barn, Wine and Beyond and Brown Jug Friendly Spirits.
“A lot of these stores have been opened 30 years. We want to freshen them up and make them presentable … and offer the best experience we can,” Bebis said.
The company is taking some successful features from its newer largeformat Wine and Beyond destination stores and applying them in its smaller convenience stores.
For Liquor Stores, North Amer- ica’s largest publicly traded liquor retailer, the revamp of its stores parallels a similar makeover in its operations.
“We felt that our performance as a public company hasn’t been as good as it could have been, so we wanted to improve our business, improve our sales and profitability,” Bebis said.
The company’s share prices tumbled from an all-time high in July 2012 of just over $20 to $9.86 in May 2014. The stock closed Friday at $13.51 per share.
To get Liquor Stores back on a growth track, it brought in an entirely new senior management team, including Bebis, who previously headed such retail heavyweights as Golf Town and Home Depot Canada.
The company announced in August it was adopting a seven-point plan to move it forward.
With two of the points already checked — enhancing senior management and investing in its store network — Bebis says Liquor Stores is making progress on the rest.
Liquor Stores is putting new emphasis on developing staff such as recent training on wine.
“We’ve trained our staff to understand what a Cab (Cabernet Sauvignon) is and how to sell it. Don’t forget, a lot of these stores are convenience-model stores and didn’t have a lot of training in that area.”