McNally Robinson Booksellers are closing their downtown Calgary store, citing high labour and real-estate costs in the booming Alberta market.
The Winnipeg-based bookstore chain has already sold its building on Calgary's Stephen Avenue Mall and plans to shut its doors in August.
Meanwhile, its Portage Place store in downtown Winnipeg will be emptied as early as this weekend as the company prepares to open its new location April 1 in the Polo Park Shopping Centre.
"We've been going on heart alone for some time now in Calgary, as we have with Portage Place," company co-owner Holly McNally said today.
"But the costs in Calgary are too high. They're beyond a bookseller's range."
The family-owned business is also preparing to open a new location in a revamped retail complex in Toronto's suburban Don Mills area.
But the opening has been postponed from October 2008 to April 2009 by developer Cadillac Fairview.
"They tell us they're behind schedule on so many things," McNally said. "All the snow this winter has been a problem."
The Calgary location, opened in a remodelled heritage building in 2002, has had problems keeping staff, given the city's severe labour shortage, McNally says.
As well, the majority of customers come in over the lunch hour, which runs contrary to company's business model of hosting evening author readings and signings.
The McNallys recently concluded the sale of their Calgary building to a local business consortium.
McNally acknowledges that they made a significant profit on the transaction, which will finance their moves to Polo Park and Toronto.
About 50 people, most of them part-time, will lose their jobs in Calgary, McNally says.
In business in Winnipeg for 25 years, McNally and her husband, Paul, opened their first big-box outlet in the Grant Park Shopping Centre in 1996, to beat the incursion of the Toronto-based Chapters chain, now owned by Indigo Books and Music. In 1998 they opened a second big box in Saskatoon and moved into Portage Place.
Indigo, which has 300 bookstores in Canada, dominates the Calgary market with 14 stand-alone and mall outlets. Indigo operates four stores in Winnipeg.
The McNallys were recently named to the list of top 30 most powerful people in Canadian publishing by the trade magazine Quill & Quire.
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
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