Canadian Tire makes big move
Southland Mall site now twice the size
With a big grin on his face — despite almost being suckerpunched by a shopper carrying a large cardboard box — Dan Leroux was now ready for a fight.
It’s over retail market share, and the owner of the south Regina Canadian Tire franchise has a new weapon: a big, new store at the east end of the Southland Mall.
“We’re going to war with good ammunition — compared with what I had before,” he said among the happy din of Thursday’s official opening, packed with customers even at 8 a.m. “Before, I was going to war with a slingshot. Now, I’m going with weapons.”
Packaged with the new store, which is 2½ times the size of the one it replaces, are several other retailers owned outright by Canadian Tire: Sport Chek, Mark’s Work Warehouse and outdoors retailer Atmosphere, a “rebranded” version of what used to be Coast Mountain Sports.
Their official opening Monday answers a question asked by many Reginans since Wal-Mart left the mall for a new, bigger store in the rapidly developing Grasslands area of Harbour Landing in early 2010: what’s going into the Wal-Mart space?
The plot thickened later that year when Zellers announced it was going into it.
But before that could happen, Minnesota-based retailer Target announced it would buy most of Zellers’ leases.
Despite being near the intersection of two major highways (1 and 6), a full kilometre from rival Wal-Mart, and in an upscale neighbourhood, the Southland Mall site was not among them.
“Maybe it’s something we scooped them on,” said a grinning Leroux, a Canadian Tire “lifer” who started out cleaning the parking lot of a store near Montreal and has owned the south Regina store for 6½ years. His new store will employ 150 people and is the second-biggest Canadian Tire store in Central Canada.
“It’s been an exchange of ideas that’s been going on for several years,” said Leroux. “We finally made it happen.”
The rest of the Southland Mall is getting a multimillion-dollar facelift of its food court, washrooms, lighting, entrances and facade.
Sandra Kaiser, spokeswoman for leasing agent SmartCentres, said it’s “busy with other leasing activity for the rest of the mall; we’re not in a position to announce it, so I guess I’d have to say, ‘Stay tuned — for the moment’.”
Across the city, Target’s redevelopment of the former Zellers property in the Northgate Mall is close enough to opening that it’s started advertising for staff.
The future of the old Canadian Tire property several blocks north of the mall is unclear. Vancouver-based London Drugs hinted last year it might open a store in it, but a flyer distributed by the Vancouver drugstore chain this week says its new site instead will be in Harbour Landing.
Thursday also saw Canadian Tire report first-quarter earnings of $73 million, up from $71 million in the same quarter of 2012. Total revenue rose by 1.7 per cent to $2.48 billion. In all, it has 500 locally run stores like Leroux’s and hundreds of retails and gas outlets.