Does New Westminster need another dollar store?
A number of vocal residents answered with a resounding "No" on a recent Twitter discussion on the topic of yet-another dollar store opening in the Royal City. The response gave a sense of the social temperature on this topic in the larger community.
The brouhaha began after a recent Record article reported that an 8,500-square-foot dollar store was set to open in the new Plaza development at the New Westminster SkyTrain station.
Resident Jen Arbo was among the naysayers, who were disappointed to hear that the city, already sporting about 10 dollar stores, would be welcoming yet another.
"Yay, another dollar store that offers the same junk that we can get at the other eight dollar stores," Arbo said sarcastically. "I grew up in a small community where today's dollar store would have been called a variety store. I think when dollar stores were introduced - and I'm just sort of ballparking here - say 15, 20 years ago, we started seeing these stores popping up all over the place. - They were marketed as, 'Hey, you can pay a buck and get all this cool stuff, and I remember being totally excited about that and thinking, 'Wow, what a deal.'
"Of course this was at a time when I didn't know what it meant to shop locally and support small producers," said Arbo, who runs Hyack Interactive, a home-based marketing and social media business she co-founded.
The city and residents need to attract a more diverse mix of retailers, Arbo said.
"I think there needs to be more specific operations that are specializing in something they do really well," she said, citing Royal City Colours, a local paint store that specializes in heritage colours, as an example.
"You can go in there and you have a level of expertise that's just unbelievable. For a high-quality paint, their prices are actually pretty good," Arbo said. "You've got these niche businesses that do what they do incredibly well, are getting in the community and they're cultivating their own success - not by volume, but by offering what they do really well. I know that's hard. It's not an easy model because you have to have financial backing."
But with the number of dollar stores that continue to pop up, it seems that not everyone shares Arbo's opinion.
Cori Lynn Germiquet, executive director New Westminster Chamber of Commerce, said that if an 8,500-square-foot store is set to open, it's likely that the backers behind the business would have done their market research and determined that there was a demand.
"I'm not going to say that I assume that they would do that, but most businesses when they are opening a business of that calibre have done extensive market research to support their business plan, so I'm going to suggest that they might have done that," Germiquet said. "That would be my expectations."
Germiquet said she isn't aware of any dollar store owners who are members of the chamber.
"I'm not familiar with a dollar store that we have as a member. However, having said that, sometimes members join under a numbered company, and they join for other reasons other than promotion," she said.
Keith Coueffin, the city's manager of licensing and integrated services, couldn't provide an exact count of the number of dollar stores in New Westminster because the city considers them retail stores.
"We just classify them as a retail store, and we don't restrict what name they use," he said. "The way we process a business licence for a retail store is they have to comply with all city regulations, and if they comply with all city regulations, they're entitled to a business licence, and we do not cap the number of licences."
Coueffin also questioned whether the "dollar store" name accurately described the store's merchandise.
"Really your definition is what they call themselves, maybe not what they do," he said. "For example, they call themselves a dollar store over at Columbia Square. You can buy furniture over there, so it's really a furniture store with a broad (definition)."
The dollar store boom doesn't seem to be exclusive to New Westminster. The giant discount retailer Dollarama, which has a location at Royal City Centre mall, reported double-digit increases last December, according to a story in the Financial Post.
Rick Spence, a columnist for The Leader-Post in Regina, wrote in an April 2009 column what made Dollarama founder, Larry Rossy, so successful.
Spence wrote that Rossy innovated on the buying side, cutting deals with the manufacturers, not the distributors most retailers deal with.
"We are awakening to a dollar-store economy," an August 2011 New York Times article by Jack Hitt stated. Low rents, cheap products and a smaller labour force all help keep costs down, Hitt's article explained.
New Westminster may be a reflection of an unstoppable discount-store explosion that is happening not just here but across North America.
