Metro Vancouver’s high rents and salaries for seasoned retail staff helped put the 102-year-old shoe-store chain Ingledew’s out of business.
So did the increasingly frequent consumer practice of determining the right shoe size in bricks-and-mortar stores before buying online from other retailers, said Ingledew’s CEO Bill Ingledew.
These forces, particularly the trend of shoppers treating physical stores as showrooms, has Ingledew fearing that there will be an earthquake of change coming in the retail sector in the next decade.
“I worry that the shopping mall that we know so well today, in as many as five to 10 years, will be completely different,” he told Business in Vancouver.
He foresees a slew of retailers struggling and landlords scrambling to find new ways to draw customers.
Oxford Properties, for example, wants to double the amount of space dedicated to food and beverage sales in its malls – to about 20% from 9%.
Other malls are increasingly having art exhibitions, Lego demonstrations and other attractions to draw shoppers.
Four of Ingledew’s six locations are in shopping malls: Park Royal South, Richmond Centre, Oakridge Centre and Brentwood Town Centre.
The company also operates one location in Victoria and one at 900 West Hastings Street.
The Victoria, Park Royal and Richmond Centre locations are connected with an Ingledew’s-run Ecco store that has a separate entrance.
All of the stores are slated to close by mid-August, with liquidation on now from what Ingledew described as a bankruptcy.
Liquidator Maynards Industries estimated that Ingledew’s has $12 million worth of inventory, and it has announced that prices are now at 25% off.
“With the amount of money we invested in these beautiful new stores, the rents that we’re having to pay landlords for space and, quite honestly, the amount of money we have to pay to get good people to be professional and to properly represent our company, the costs were far outstripping any gains we were seeing in sales in stores,” Ingledew said.
He invited all staff to the West Hastings Street store on May 2 to break the news. That store is a relatively new location. Ingledew said he opened it after he sold a building at 577 Granville Street to Bonnis Properties in 2014 and had to move the long-standing Ingledew’s store out of that location.
Traction at the store on the corner of Hastings and Hornby streets had not been what he had hoped.
(Image: Pedestrians stand outside the Ingledew's store at the corner of Hastings and Hornby Street | Rob Kruyt)
“Any street location in Vancouver has been challenged with the weather we’ve experienced over the last few months,” he said.
“We’ve had a lot of tourists and people visiting the store who were staying at the Vancouver Club or local hotels, but many customers from Granville Street did not know we moved.”
Retail Insider Media owner and retail analyst Craig Patterson told BIV he was surprised that Ingledew’s chose the West Hastings Street location because, aside from the nearby Montecristo jewelry store, there is no other retail within a block.
He agreed with Ingledew, however, that retail is rapidly evolving and said the ultra-competitive shoe retail sector in particular is undergoing dramatic change.
Vancouver’s Shoes.com halted business suddenly in January and liquidated assets that included its ShoeMe.ca and Shoes.com web domains.
DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse acquired the ShoeMe.ca domain; Walmart (NYSE:WMT) bought the Shoes.com domain and is using it to promote shoes from its Shoebuy.com Inc. subsidiary, which Walmart bought in January, just a few weeks before Shoes.com ceased operations. •
