While I would love to see more machines at PA, I think I'm too risk adverse to hope PA buys them. PA is privately held (three generations) and has done a good job of keeping up with much bigger firms in terms of marketing, customer service, and off-shoring. They seem to understand their customers and there seems to be reasonable satisfaction amongst employees.
I'd worry if they bought out BB they'd make the same mistake as other stores like Sobeys did with their acquisition of Safeway. They got too greedy, over-extended themselves, and now can't afford to complete. So they cut back on things like demographic product selection, and focus on selling retail shelf space to companies instead of developing e-commerce pickup and delivery that customers have asked for for years. Along comes a disrupter like a pandemic, and bang...you're in fecal matter and fan territory.
PA has its own electronic fulfillment centre, and in Calgary we're lucky enough to have a distribution centre too. I'd love to see more selection at PA, but would sacrifice this in a moment if it meant they stayed competitive and economically healthy. Plus, I don't really need more selection...I just want it, and that's different. The Canadian business landscape is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to grow too fast. It's a pattern: they go public to raise capital, overextend themselves with acquisitions, make a few bad choices, the stock tanks, and the Americans buy it for pennies on the dollar. It then dies a Viking funeral on a flaming raft while everyone on shore says, "Gee...how did this happen?"
In addition to the lack of customers at BB I think they were suffering for a while. When I first started to go the Calgary location, I noticed how many parking stalls they had. They seem to have far fewer stalls now, and I suspect they subleased some of these stalls to the company with all the white trucks in the lots. I could be wrong, but if not, it's a sign something is amiss. I'd be curious to see their sales figures for the Calgary location. I suspect the relocation of PA hurt their business as many guys "did the rounds" between places like PA, BB and even Active Components before they too moved. In the 1970s there used to be a restaurant called "Shakeys Pizza Parlor,"
that purposely located their franchises near Kinney Shoe locations becuase the demographics worked so well. BB lost that advantage when PA moved in Calgary.
I hope BB survives. I really hope PA survives. Governments around the world will have to raise taxes to fund all the handouts. If I were a business owner these days, my strategy meetings would be all about online sales and reducing my tax footprint in the future.
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