This past week saw demolition of the old Shediac Outfitters Building.

Now ordinarily that might escape the notice of most people except for one thing – it used to be the Shediac Post Office. I’m not sure when it was built but likely sometime in the 1950s or maybe it was the sixties. It wasn’t a heritage building but I’m certain it had some lush secrets hidden in its walls.

What’s most disturbing is that apparently it’s going to be replaced by a wonderful Dollarama store. Now here we have a prime, downtown building space in a beautiful resort town and all we can do with it is put up a Dollarama – maybe it will be the new showcase for the Town’s exotic frog collection.

Dollarama is a franchised retail chain with more than 400 stores in Canada. Most of them are in Quebec and their head office is in Montreal. A good number of their stores are located on sites formerly occupied by the now defunct Bi-Way stores, a chain of Canadian discount retailers. Few of these Dollarama stores sit on the gravestone of a deceased Post Office. A little over two years ago, in November 2004, the firm was sold to a U.S. equity firm in Boston for a billion dollars U.S.
In June 2006, the Financial Post reported that Dollarama was undergoing a major transformation to bulk up for a possible re-sale. Earlier in the year, Dollarama had posted revenue of $743-million boosted by 51 new store openings. The company has averaged 31 new stores per year since 2000 and is projecting fifty new stores a year for the next three years.

They occupy some 3.7 million square feet of selling space in this Country and command an estimated 40% plus market share of dollar store sales in Canada.

The company has succeeded by being one of the earliest Canadian retailers to extensively source product from the Far East (India, China, Taiwan and other low wage countries), offering merchandise that appears to be a great deal for the price. While other dollar-store operators went the franchise route, now billionaire and former owner Larry Rossy retained corporate ownership of his stores and developed his own sourcing and distribution capabilities.

According to Toronto-based retail consultant Len Kubas "Rossy used to say, 'I don't need cash registers, all I need is a box that holds dollars". Judging by the absence of debit card scanners, price tags and bar codes in his stores, one might assume success, comes from cheap labour and shelves stocked with low-cost junk.

Mr. Rossy, the grandson of a Syrian-born peddler, who ran a modest chain of variety stores in Quebec before getting into the dollar store business, is working for Bain Capital Partners.

According to the Financial Post, the Boston-based buyout firm paid him $1.03-billion for 80% of Dollarama in November, 2004, and then saddled the retailer with more than $600-million in long-term debt from the leveraged buyout.

According to its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, there is one dollar store for every 18,000 people in the United States, and one for every 26,7000 in Canada. That implies there is room for another 729 dollar stores in Canada if we want to reach the U.S. store-to-people ratio.

Wow! Instead of being overrun by Wal-Mart, Shediac will be able to boast its Main Street Dollarama store.

So why should we care about a Dollarama store?

Well, I for one care because apparently this discounter is going to occupy a prime landmark site in downtown Shediac across Main Street from the town park and site of the old Shediac Inn.

This is a place frequented by tourists, artists and residents. It should be a place for upscale heritage development not home to a discount retailer. I’m not aware of any public discussion concerning permission to demolish the old Post Office building or any public conversation regarding permits for the construction of a low-end retail outlet in a spot that by virtue of its location, visibility and traffic will come to characterize the town as a down-scale retail destination rather than a high-end resort town for tourists and visitors.

This unhappy event comes amidst the noise from chambers of Town Council this week concerning the passing of Shediac’s Town Manager and the importation of exotic frogs to populate one of the Town’s most important heritage sites – the Pascal Poirier House.

The Pascal Poirier House is the oldest house in Shediac. The one and a half storey wood frame house was the birthplace and home of the great Acadian patriot, Pascal Poirier (1852-1933). In 1885, he was chosen by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to serve as the first Acadian Senator in Canada.

For more than 150 years, the house remained in the Poirier family. When the town of Shediac acquired the house to preserve it as an historical museum, there was no mention of turning it into an exotic, Amazonian zoo. A fine dining establishment or a mini-reenactment theatre would be more appropriate.

Most Dollarama stores stand ugly in the corner of a shopping mall. If we have to live with one, full Monty in downtown Shediac, surely we could demand that its external facade replicate the character and values of the Pascal Poirier House or the original Shediac Inn.

That’s the least our amphibian-loving Council could do for the Town.

The standard for renovation and reconstruction has been set by the owners and renovators of the Poirier House, the Tait House, Bogarts, the Caisse Populaire, Restaurant Gabrièle, Greenhouse on Main, the Old Fisherman, the new optical shop on East Main and some of the restored heritage properties along Main.

We should demand nothing less from our esteemed Dollarama group.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com