Peavey Mart opens first store in Winnipeg; more in offing

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This article was published 01/04/2014 (4232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new player has entered the home-hardware segment of the local retail market.

Alberta-based Peavey Industries Ltd. opened its first Peavey Mart store in Winnipeg last Wednesday and hopes to open at least three more in Manitoba over the next three years.

The Winnipeg store is the company’s 32nd in Western Canada and its second in Manitoba. The other Manitoba outlet is in Swan River.

Company president Doug Anderson said Monday that Peavey officials believe the Winnipeg market is big enough to support two stores. But it plans to wait and see how the public responds to the first one before deciding whether to add a second one.

“We don’t expand just for the sake of expanding. But so far, it looks quite promising. The customers (at the Nairn Avenue store) seemed quite happy to see us open.”

In addition to Winnipeg, the other Manitoba towns and cities Peavey is eyeing include Brandon, Dauphin, Portage la Prairie, Steinbach and the Winkler-Morden area. Anderson said they’ll go wherever the best opportunities are for potential sales and availability of a suitable site.

The kinds of products Peavey Mart carries in its 40,000-square-foot Nairn Avenue store — it moved into the former McDiarmid Lumber location at Unit 12, 1150 Nairn — include things like power tools, lawn-and-garden supplies, outdoor-living products, and plumbing, heating and electrical supplies.

But the product offering isn’t limited to just hardware items. Peavey Marts also carry a variety of agriculture-related products — things like fences and gates, animal feed, horse tack, and storage tanks — as well as housewares, welding supplies, automotive products, work clothes and hunting supplies. “We’re a little-bit-of-everything kind of store,” Anderson added.

Although it’s been headquartered in Red Deer for many years, Anderson said the nearly 40-year-old company got its start in Manitoba in the late 1960s or early 1970s as National Farm Way Stores. The Peavey Mart chain was sold to a group of managers in 1984 and has been western Canadian-owned since then.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca