News - Pakenham Officer - 21st January 2016

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Connecting people & communities PAKENHAM OFFICER Thursday, 21 January, 2016

Incorporating South-East Star Real Estate

A Star News Group publication

Phone: 5945 0666

Pakenham

Connecting people

40c inc. GST and communities www.

south easter

.com.au

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Residentss rubbish speeding

Tractors pull a crowd

Matt’s ace Open experience

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SPORT

Thursday, 21

January, 2016

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Property ty Lift outt

■ Workers hit as Woolworths tries to repair balance sheet...

Store shelved By ANEEKA SIMONIS THE impending closure of Masters Home Improvement store in Pakenham will see more than 100 employees turfed out of a job. It is the second major hardware store to leave Pakenham in the past few months following the mid-year closure of the Hardy’s Mitre 10 store, further monopolising Bunnings as the go-to for home and garden improvements. The Pakenham store is one of the company’s 63 outlets across the country that are due to close. The store, which employs 110 staff, has been open for two years and was the 16th to open in Victoria. Masters owner Woolworths issued a statement on Monday 18 January saying that it would take several months for its joint-venture partner to exercise its option to sell its stake in the business to Woolworths. The joint-venture partners had been under shareholder pressure to wind up the business following ongoing losses. The statement said that it would take at least two months to wind up the financial arrangements and following this a potential sale process or other exit

process would take additional time. “The business will continue to trade through this period. Our top priority is to do the right thing by all stakeholders," the statement read. Residents empathised with the dozens of hardware workers that will now have to search for a new job. “Sad for the people that work there,” wrote Carol on the Gazette’s Facebook page. However, others took the opportunity to make suggestions for appropriate retailers to take over the space. Kmart was a hot favourite, a sentiment echoed by more than 3000 people supporting an online campaign for the store to develop in Pakenham. Hardy’s Mitre 10 in Pakenham shut its store in August last year. The iconic local store operated in the area for more than 60 years. It employed 80 staff, some believed to have taken up employment at the soon-to-be-closed Masters chain. The Hardy’s site, located on the corner of Bald Hill Road and Racecourse Road, was taken over by hardware giant Bunnings.

Masters Home Improvement stores will shut nationwide.

Kylie Lovett: I like both stores. There are some things you can’t get in one but can get in the other. I do prefer the paint from Masters and their colour selection is far better. Masters’s customer service is far better than Bunnings, though. It was always going to be hard to compete against Bunnings, they have been in the market for such a long time and have

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established themselves in our way of life. Natasha Sadovski: I feel for the employees. I have to admit, I rarely went there. Dylan Hill: Sad to see another store go and only having one hardware store isn’t a good thing. We need competition and Bunnings needs to stock more products. Bruce Bjay Mawby: I am sad to hear this, I preferred Masters to Bunnings! Dan Prest: A few people that I used to work with at Hardys moved on to Masters

after we closed. A double whammy for them. Wayne Deane: Maybe if they did not try to take Bunnings customers by building stores next to or over the road from Bunnings they would have succeeded. Building stores where there is no existing hardware chain/store would have brought customers that previously had to go further for items. Penny Awesum: Invest in a Kmart in its place!

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