One less shopping option in Terrace

Here’s a change of pace for the shopping Mecca to the east of Podunk.

The Zeller’s store in the Skeena Mall is scheduled to close its doors in January of 2007.

Zellers which has been operating in the Skeena Mall since 1998 took over the space from K Mart which was bought out by Zellers parent company Hudson’s Bay Co. It operated under that Zellers banner ever since.

The closure is part of the chain’s operational review plans which were required with the recent purchase of the Hudson’s Bay Co. by and American investor who is determined to make the chain profitable, mainly by closing those stores that can’t compete.

Anyone who has been in the Terrace store probably can understand why they ended up on the chopping block. It has always been kind of a frumpy looking place, with poor lighting and with a rather claustrophobic feel to the place. Compared to the wider more open spaces of Canadian Tire and Wal Mart, a trip to Zellers in Terrace was always a quick dash in and out, you never really felt the wish to linger too long there.

The story first appeared in the Look Inside paper which came out yesterday.
Below is the story in full.

ZELLERS TO CLOSE IN TERRACE
Shaun Thomas
Look Inside
May 10, 2006
Page 11

The face of the Skeena Mall will look quite different in the coming years, as the Hudson’s Bay Company announced last week that it would be closing its Terrace location effective the end of January, 2007.

Zellers has been operating in its present location in the mall since 1998 when the Hudson’s Bay Company purchased K-Mart Canada, which had operated a similar store in that location for a number of years, from a group of investors. The Terrace location is one of several stores that will be closed following an annual review of the HBC operations, said company spokesperson Alisha Bard.

“It’s always a difficult decision to close a store, but we have 500 stores across Canada and are constantly reviewing our portfolio to maintain the best possible operations… There are a lot of variables that go into the decision to close down a store.”

“We are closing stores across Canada at a rate consistent with previous years, and we have closed approximately 10 stores per year in the past,” she added.

And while the Zellers store in Terrace is closing down, Bard said she did not know of any future company plans that would impact the Prince Rupert location, the only other Zellers location in the region.