Planet Fitness to replace wine store in Norwalk
NORWALK — Three years after swapping in booze in place of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, Wine and Beyond is closing on Connecticut Avenue — with Planet Fitness to be slotted in as its replacement.
Royal Properties lists Planet Fitness as the new tenant for Wine & Beyond’s space at 360 Connecticut Ave., where the store is winding down with plans to shutter at the end of this month. Planet Fitness has an existing location on Pearl Street in Norwalk, with the company having taken over a former Borders bookstore in Danbury six years ago as part of its Connecticut expansion.
Wine and Beyond is owned by Canadabased Alcanna, whose predecessor company Liquor Stores N.A. opened the Norwalk store in 2016 as LQR MKT before changing the name as wine came to dominate sales.
The company would begin seeking a buyer for the Norwalk location within a year citing competitive pressures, on the heels of an unsuccessful lobbying campaign by some package store chains for Connecticut to scratch a policy of minimum prices that help small stores compete with bigbox retailers.
The Norwalk store is closing even as Alcanna CEO James Burns highlighted recently the chain’s performance in Alberta, where the company has eight stores along with its headquarters office in Edmonton. In addition to liquor and wine, Alcanna touts the Norwalk store as having the largest walkin beer cooler in Connecticut.
“Wine and Beyond is extremely wellpriced because it’s a destination store like any big box,” Burns said of the overall chain’s appeal. “It has incredible selection ... but at the end of the day, your basic offering has to be [price] competitive, especially when you’re starting off . ... They take a year or so to really start to produce the bottomline returns.”
Alcanna lost $18.3 million in the first nine months of this year, as the company invested in a chain of cannabis outlets in Canada and acquired the 28store Solo Liquor chain. The expansion contributed to a 22 percent gain in revenue from a year earlier to $570 million.
Wine and Beyond became the second of two bigbox liquor stores in Norwalk after Total Wine & More, which opened in 2012 on Main Avenue. The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection allots the city up to 34 package stores, listing five permits available at last report. Other large retailers include Al’s Warehouse, BevMax, Stew Leonard’s Wines & Spirits and World of Beverages, with several smaller wine specialty stores dotting Norwalk as well.
Barnes & Noble closed in January 2015 at 360 Connecticut Ave., with the storefront staying empty for more than 18 months before its conversion to a liquor outlet in a shopping plaza anchored by ShopRite.
Furniture stores have filled the two other major retail vacancies along Connecticut Avenue the past few years, with Bob’s Discount Furniture in the process of renovating a former Toys “R” Us store; and a onetime Staples office supplies store leased in 2017 by Ashley HomeStore, the largest furniture retailer in the United States.
At 574 Main Ave., another large storefront will be emptied after the 2019 holiday season, as Dressbarn enters its final 10 days of clearance sales as parent company Ascena Retail Group shutters stores nationally.