The larger Liquor Mart that has been in Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries’ (MBLL) plans for more than two years is now under construction in the northwest corner of the City- Centre Mall parking lot.
In presentations to council, the Thompson Chamber of Commerce and the public in March and May of 2016, MBLL representatives said there were many reasons for wanting to relocate from the current store, which was built in 1975, particularly sales volume and storage efficiency.
The Thompson Liquor Mart, which measures about 3,000 square feet, attracts nearly 200,000 customers per year, and is only about a third as large as other Liquor Marts in Manitoba with similar amounts of sales, which usually exceed 10,000 square feet.
The new store, MBLL said in 2016, would be about 12,000 square feet overall, with two-thirds of the total dedicated to sales and the rest to receiving and storage.
The current Liquor Mart receives about 40,000 pounds of freight per week, which has to be moved from storage areas in the basement to the sales floor upstairs.
The cost of the project was estimated to be about $5 million when it was first made public in 2016 and MBLL expected that the project, which it said would be required to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver standard certification and exceed the 2011 National Energy Code for buildings under provincial government regulations, would create the equivalent of about 10 full-time construction jobs for a period of one year.
MBLL said it didn’t expect that the new store would have significantly more employees than the current store and that the old store would shut down permanently the day before the new store opened its doors.
Information presented to council at that time indicated that about 22,000 people were asked for proof of age in the Thompson Liquor Mart in 2015 and 840 refused sales because they didn’t have it. That same year, about 5,500 people were refused sales in Thompson because staff believed they were intoxicated.
The Thompson Citizen requested an interview with an MBLL representative Aug. 9 but was told that some of the staff with access to updated information were currently away from the office and that someone would likely be available to discuss current details sometime during the week of Aug. 20-24.
