Re: “McNally Robinson closing,” Bookends, March 20-26, 2008.

What I would have asked McNally Robinson's general manager, instead of accepting every excuse and insult he drops in front of us:

1. How is “rent” an issue in your decision to close when you owned your building? Why do you keep talking about how high rents make it difficult to open a bookstore downtown, when this problem didn't even apply to you until you decided to sell the building and take a $3.25 million profit?

2. Why is downtown vibrancy more of an issue in downtown Calgary than it is in your store in the much less vibrant downtown Winnipeg, where you have had a store for much longer?

3. How are cost pressures in Calgary, for staff or rent or anything else, any greater than one (or two?) stores in Manhattan, the most expensive place to do business in North America?

4. Why is a busy daytime trade but a less busy evening any different from your store in downtown Winnipeg, or any different from what you'll see at Don Mills but in reverse (slow days, less-slow evenings and weekends)? Doesn't all retail everywhere have patterns like this?

5. How are labour pressures any greater here than in your Saskatoon store, which remains open?

6. Was your Calgary store profitable? (The answer here would be yes, incidentally.)

7. If you had problems retaining staff, why did one of your staff members post on my blog that “one may want to consider the staff that planned on working at that store for life”? You're saying that you didn’t have dedicated staff?

8. Why are you opening a store in Toronto? Why are you opening a second store in New York City? And isn't your decision to open in these expensive markets the real reason for your choosing to close in Calgary — this and the fact that the Calgary store was the only one that would furnish you the money, after its sale, to bankroll these quixotic projects?

I am sick of the implicit and explicit blame being laid on Calgarians for McNally Robinson's business decision, and I am tired of Calgarians’ annoying and limp-wristed habit of accepting every “culture-addled rednecks who can't support X” criticism thrown at us.

We read books. We gave this store plenty of support. This manager and the store's owners insult all of us by not simply declaring why this store is closing. They made a bundle off the sale of the building. This was about McNally Robinson's greed, not a hapless independent business being hounded out of town by the evil boom. The boom has made them millionaires. I'm burning my reader's reward card.

John Manzo,

Calgary