Just 18 months after hardware store chain Lowe’s Canada opened a location in this city, the American parent company has announced it is shuttering nearly three dozen Rona stores across the country, including the longstanding shop right across the street from the St. Albert Lowe’s. Its last day of business will be Jan. 31, 2020.
In a press release on its website, Lowe’s Canada’s interim president Tony Cioffi explained that major restructuring such as this is meant to help ensure the company’s future.
“While making decisions that impact our associates and their families is never easy, closing underperforming stores is a necessary step in our plan to ensure the long-term stability and growth of our Canadian business,” he stated.
“We are taking decisive action to build a healthy business which will provide us with the flexibility to reinvest in our future growth. Our objective continues to be providing our Canadian customers with the right products and the best service and value across every channel, for the long term.”
Lowe’s owns 67 stores in Canada, as well as 21 Réno-Dépôt stores and just over 400 Rona outlets, as well as 100 stores of different banners.
St. Albert’s Rona was in operation for just over a decade after starting out as the city’s Home Hardware in the building that now houses Value Village. The former Totem Building Supplies was sold to Rona in 2013, which prompted the closure of the Inglewood Drive location to the one branch at 730 St. Albert Trail, right next door to the Home Depot. The neighbourly competition for home renovation supplies and services on the north end of the city continued and then amplified when the Lowe’s store opened a 108,000-sq.-ft. store in early 2018 only a block north on the east side of St. Albert Trail.
At the time, local consumers speculated that the new would soon supersede the old.
"It's going to be tough business. You can only have so many within a certain area. Somebody is going to suffer,” Stan Nadro said in the Gazette’s 2018 article on the grand opening of Lowe’s.
"I'm wondering when Rona is going to close, because they own Rona," Jack Riley added.
In addition to the closure of the St. Albert Rona, other Alberta locations on the slab include Edmonton’s Parsons Road location and the one in Sherwood Park on Baseline Road, as well as others in Calgary and Airdrie. It has not been announced how many employees this will affect or how.
While there are some Lowe’s locations set to close, the one in St. Albert will remain open.
The move comes only a month after the company cut 60 accounting jobs at its Quebec headquarters. Last November, Lowe’s closed 31 other stores across the country as well. Lowe's is an American company that only entered Canada after buying Quebec-based Rona for $3.2 billion in 2016.
Its website says it enjoyed sales of $71.3 billion in 2018 throughout its 2,200-plus home improvement and hardware stores that employed approximately 300,000 people, including approximately 28,000 in Canada in addition to nearly 5,000 employees in the stores of independent affiliate dealers operating under the Rona and Ace banners.
