Tag Archives: bankruptcy

McNally Blames Expansion for Woes

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A few weeks ago I accused book­seller McNally Robin­son of miss­ing the plot twist fol­low­ing their entry into bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion. What I said was (1) that they had expanded at the wrong time, in the wrong way and (2) that they didn’t have an effec­tive strat­egy for com­pet­ing with online book sales.

Well, last week McNally emerged from bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion and Paul McNally made some pub­lic com­ment on what went wrong, as he saw it. The biggest sin­gle fac­tor he cites was the fail­ure of their Don Mills store to meet the sales tar­gets for which they had hoped. He spec­u­lated that their strat­egy of com­mu­nity involve­ment maybe didn’t play as well in T-Dot, but it has also been noted that the Don Mills mall in which they were located has been a dis­ap­point­ment to many of its retail tenants.

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McNally Robinson Misses the Plot Twist

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It’s been McNally Robinson - Polo Park, Winnipeg announced today that McNally Robin­son is clos­ing two of its stores and have entered bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion for restructuring.

For those not in Win­nipeg, it’s worth men­tion­ing that the inde­pen­dent book­seller is a local suc­cess story, hav­ing started here in 1981 and grown to have stores not only in Win­nipeg, but also in Saska­toon, Toronto, and New York as well as online. Many Win­nipeg­gers have a “feel-good” sense about sup­port­ing this local option for their book pur­chases, and it’s a pop­u­lar spot for book launches as well. Most loca­tions also fea­ture a (non-Starbucks) café/restaurant of some sort, the Prairie Ink Café. To be clear, I like McNally Robin­son as a book­store. The loca­tions I’ve been in are all large with a good selec­tion of titles and spe­cial pro­mo­tion for local authors.

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