Peavey Mart confirms all 90 stores will be closing

Sources have confirmed to Retail Insider that Peavey Mart, a Canadian retail chain known for its agricultural supplies, hardware, and home improvement products, is closing all of its stores nationwide. Liquidation sales began on the weekend. The store closures include the flagship location in Red Deer, Alberta, where the company’s headquarters are also based. This marks a significant and surprising turn of events for a company with deep roots in Canadian retail, dating back to its establishment in Winnipeg in 1967.

(Update: Peavey Industries confirmed store closures on Monday evening in a press release)

A Legacy of Growth and Acquisitions

Peavey Mart has long been a staple for rural and small-town communities, catering to farmers, ranchers, and homeowners. Over the years, the company expanded from its Western Canada base into Ontario and other regions, particularly following its acquisition of TSC Stores in 2016. That move helped establish Peavey Mart as a household name in Ontario, diversifying its reach and bolstering its product offerings. It was also a huge expense.

In 2020, the company further broadened its scope by acquiring the Canadian master license for Ace Hardware from Lowe’s-owned RONA Inc., adding 107 Ace Hardware locations to its portfolio. This strategic acquisition was part of Peavey Industries’ efforts to compete in the hardware and home improvement sector against larger rivals like Home Depot and Canadian Tire.

However, Peavey’s relationship with Ace Hardware International came to an end in 2024, following the announcement that the partnership would cease on December 31, 2024. This decision marked a turning point for the company, forcing it to refocus on its Peavey Mart and MainStreet Hardware brands.

Financial Struggles and Early Signs of Trouble

Last week, Peavey Industries announced plans to shutter 22 underperforming Peavey Mart locations in Ontario and Nova Scotia by the end of April. At the time, the closures were presented as part of an organizational restructuring aimed at stabilizing the business and positioning it for future growth.

Doug Anderson, President and CEO of Peavey Industries, addressed the challenges in a previous statement:

“The Canadian retail environment has undergone significant disruptions in recent years, and Peavey has not been immune to these challenges. These closures are a challenging yet necessary step to stabilize and position our business for future growth.”

Despite these efforts, it now appears the company’s financial difficulties have proven insurmountable, leading to the closure of all 90+ stores across Canada.

Liquidation signs at Peavey Mart’s Red Deer store on Saturday, January 25. Photo: Joel Graham via Facebook

Financing and Restructuring Efforts Fall Short

In its bid to remain viable, Peavey Industries had secured a CAD $155 million financing package from Gordon Brothers. The package included a $105 million revolving credit facility, a $30 million term loan, and a $20 million consignment program. This financial injection was intended to facilitate restructuring efforts, support ongoing operations, and provide a lifeline to the struggling retailer.

Additionally, Peavey Industries collaborated with Gordon Brothers to ensure a smooth transition for affected employees and communities. However, these measures were ultimately insufficient to save the business.

Impact on Communities and Employees

The closure of Peavey Mart will leave a significant void in the Canadian retail landscape, particularly in rural and small-town markets where the chain has long been a trusted resource for agricultural and home improvement needs. The closures are also a major blow to the company’s workforce across the country.

While Peavey Industries initially expressed a commitment to supporting its employees during the transition, the abrupt announcement of a full shutdown leaves many workers and communities grappling with uncertainty.

Image: Peavey Mart

Image: Peavey Mart

A message from the Peace River Manager

In a heartfelt statement shared on Facebook, the manager of the Peace River, Alberta, Peavey Mart location expressed regret about the closures. The post sheds light on the situation and offers a glimpse into the company’s struggles over recent years. The manager wrote:

“Peace River Community,

It is with regret that I inform you of the upcoming closure of Peace River Peavey Mart, along with all other Peavey Mart locations across Canada. While many details are being kept confidential, I will keep you updated as we receive more information from the corporate team. At this time, I do not have a time frame; my best guess is 3 to 6 months.

Until an official statement is released by the company, I can only offer my personal perspective on the situation. Since 2016, Peavey Mart has expanded rapidly, acquiring over 70 stores in Eastern Canada, opening new stores, and acquiring several other businesses. However, growth was met with challenges, including a decline in business levels and rising interest rates. Unfortunately, many of the acquired stores did not prove profitable, and the company’s efforts to adjust did not have the desired results.

As a last resort, Peavey partnered with Gordon Brothers, an American investment firm, which I believe now holds a majority stake in the company and are making all decisions going forward. It appears the current plan may be to liquidate and close all locations, with potential rebranding, though which stores will remain open is still uncertain.

Please note that this is my personal opinion, and I am sharing it to help clarify the situation for our valued customers. I kindly ask that you direct any concerns toward our corporate offices, as these decisions are beyond the control of the staff here in the store.

We have worked diligently to serve you, and we appreciate your understanding during this time. It’s difficult to come to terms with the closure of so many profitable locations in Western Canada, with Peace River being one of the most notable. The Peace River location recently achieved top sales growth company-wide, consistently delivering a healthy profit despite Peavey’s constant inventory challenges.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of our customers. It has been a pleasure serving the Peace River community, and I will miss it when our time here comes to an end. If you have any questions, please feel free to visit the store, and I will do my best to provide answers. At the current moment, the company has told us they are not ready to make a statement yet.”

Update: Press Release from Peavey Industries

Peavey Industries confirmed Monday evening that all Peavey Mart stores will be closing. The following is the press release that was forwarded by email to Canadian media sources:

“Red Deer, Alberta – January 27, 2025 – Peavey Industries LP (“Peavey” or “the Company”), Canada’s largest farm and ranch retail chain, announced today that it has sought and obtained an Initial Order for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) from the Court of King’s Bench Alberta.

Following the recently announced closures of 22 stores in Ontario and Nova Scotia, the Company will now begin store closing sales at all remaining locations across Canada. This includes 90 Peavey Mart stores and six MainStreet Hardware locations. The closures and liquidation efforts will commence immediately.

The decision to seek creditor protection and close all stores was made after thorough evaluation of available options, in consultation with legal and financial advisors. The Canadian retail industry is experiencing unprecedented challenges, including record-low consumer confidence, inflationary pressures, rising operating costs, and ongoing supply disruptions along with a difficult regulatory environment. These factors have created significant obstacles for businesses like Peavey.

“This was a profoundly difficult decision, but one that allows us to explore the best possible alternatives for the future of the Company,” said Doug Anderson, President and CEO of Peavey Industries LP. “For nearly six decades, our customers’ loyalty, employees’ dedication, and the resilience of the communities we serve have been the cornerstone of our business. We remain focused on working with our partners and stakeholders to preserve the Peavey brand and the value it represents.”

The Company’s immediate priority is to generate liquidity through the closure process while continuing to work with funders, partners, and stakeholders to explore potential opportunities to preserve the brand.

Peavey Industries LP is committed to providing regular updates as the situation develops.”

Craig Patterson

Located in Toronto, Craig is the Publisher & CEO of Retail Insider Media Ltd. He is also a retail analyst and consultant, Advisor at the University of Alberta School Centre for Cities and Communities in Edmonton, former lawyer and a public speaker. He has studied the Canadian retail landscape for over 25 years and he holds Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws Degrees.

Related Topics:CraigPatterson feature PeaveyMart RetailInsider

Don't Miss

Instead of competing, Ontario’s Ford plans to spend billions to stimulate growth

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

RFK Jr. fires back in defense of vaccine stance amid heated Senate confirmation hearing

Alberta / 30 mins ago

Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms challenges AMA to debate Alberta COVID-19 Review

Uncategorized / 49 mins ago

All 6 people trying to replace Trudeau agree with him on almost everything

Business

Instead of competing, Ontario’s Ford plans to spend billions to stimulate growth

Published on January 28, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

Premier Doug Ford, who will trigger an election this week, recently said he plans to “spend billions of dollars” to stimulate Ontario’s economy if President Donald Trump makes good on his threat to slap a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports into the United States.

But rather than piling on even more spending, the next Ontario government—whoever that may be—should enact policies that finally get provincial finances back in order and make Ontario an attractive place to work and invest.

Relief can’t come soon enough. The Ford government has woefully mismanaged provincial finances. When first elected in 2018, Premier Ford promised to balance the budget and reduce government debt—something Ford’s former finance minister Vic Fedeli described as a “moral” imperative. Yet since then, the government has run deficits in five of six years and its net debt burden has increased by an estimated $70.3 billion.

As a result, in 2023 Ontario had the second-highest debt burden of any province (only Newfoundland and Labrador had a larger burden) when measured on a per-person basis.

Based on the Ford government’s latest fiscal update, the reckless mismanagement has continued into this fiscal year (2024/25). Despite enjoying lower-than-expected debt interest costs and higher-than-expected revenues—which combined could have nearly eliminated the budget deficit—the Ford government instead chose to again increase spending and keep running deficits.

Why should Ontarians care?

Because the Ford government’s penchant for spending and borrowing is hurting Ontario’s economy. When the government runs a deficit and accumulates more debt, it competes with individuals, households and businesses for borrowing. This drives up interest rates (i.e. the cost of borrowing) for everyone, which can reduce the level of investment in the economy. Moreover, because rising debt and higher interest rates equal higher interest payments, the government faces pressure to raise taxes. And the brunt of the new tax burden will fall on younger generations of Ontarians.

Also this week, Premier Ford said President Trump “wants to attract businesses from Ontario to come down to the United States,” which will eliminate jobs in the province.

And Ford’s right. When policymakers create the conditions to attract people and investment, their economies grow and people prosper.

If the Ontario government wants to beat Trump at his own game, it should lower personal income taxes and make the province a more attractive destination for high-skilled workers such as engineers and entrepreneurs who contribute greatly to the economy and create jobs. Lower taxes also improve the incentive for individuals to engage in productive activities such as working, saving and investing. In 2023, Ontario had the third-highest top combined (provincial and federal) personal income tax rate in Canada and the U.S.

The government should also lower business taxes to make Ontario more competitive with the U.S. in attracting businesses and investment—the pillars of job-creation and prosperity.

Regardless of who wins the election, the next Ontario government should finally restore some semblance of fiscal responsibility and balance the budget. And it should lower taxes for workers and businesses to help create prosperity across the province. That’s a much more sensible and sustainable way to counter threats from Trump (or anyone else) than spending billions of dollars borrowed on the backs of Ontarians.

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Grady Munro

Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute

Artificial Intelligence

Everyone is freaking out over DeepSeek. Here’s why

Published on January 28, 2025

Todayville

From The Deep View

$600 billion collapse

Volatility is kind of a given when it comes to Wall Street’s tech sector. It doesn’t take much to send things soaring; it likewise doesn’t take much to set off a downward spiral.

After months of soaring, Monday marked the possible beginning of a spiral, and a Chinese company seems to be at the center of it.

Alright, what’s going on: A week ago, Chinese tech firm DeepSeek launched R1, a so-called reasoning model, that, according to DeepSeek, has reached technical parity with OpenAI’s o1 across a few benchmarks. But, unlike its American competition, DeepSeek open-sourced R1 under an MIT license, making it significantly cheaper and more accessible than any of the closed models coming from U.S. tech giants.

But the real punchline here doesn’t have to do with R1 at all, but with a previous language model — called V3 — that DeepSeek released in December. DeepSeek was reportedly able to train V3 using a small collection of older Nvidia chips (about 2,000 H800s) at a cost of about $5.6 million.
Still, training is only one cost of many tied to AI development/deployment; while the costs associated with researching, developing, training and operating both R1 and V3 remain either unknown or unconfirmed, DeepSeek’s apparent ability to reach technical parity at a far reduced cost, without state-of-the-art GPU chips or massive GPU clusters, has a lot of implications for America’s now tenuous position in AI leadership. (Though DeepSeek says it is open-sourced, the company did not release its training data).

Since the release of R1, DeepSeek has become the top free app in Apple’s App Store, bumping ChatGPT to the number two slot. In the midst of its spiking popularity, DeepSeek restricted new sign-ups due to large-scale cyberattacks against its servers. And, as Salesforce Chief Marc Benioff noted, “no Nvidia supercomputers or $100M needed,” a point that the market heard loud and clear.

What happened: Led by Nvidia, a series of tech and chip stocks, in addition to the three major stock indices, fell hard in pre-market trading early Monday morning. All told, $1.1 trillion of U.S. market cap was erased within a half hour of the opening bell.

Performance didn’t get better throughout the day. Nvidia closed Monday down 17%, erasing some $600 billion in market capitalization, a Wall Street record. TSMC was down 14%, Arm was down 11%, Broadcom was down 17%, Google was down 4% and Microsoft was down 2%. The S&P fell 1.4% and the Nasdaq fell 3.3%. An Nvidia spokesperson called R1 an “excellent AI advancement.”
This is all going into a week of Big Tech earnings, where Microsoft and Meta will be held to account for the billions of dollars ($80 billion and $65 billion, respectively) they plan to spend on AI infrastructure in 2025, a cost that Wall Street no longer seems to feel quite so good about.

It’s hard to miss the political tensions underlying all of this. The tail end of former President Joe Biden’s time in office was marked in part by an increasingly tense trade war with China, wherein both countries issued bans on the export of materials needed to build advanced AI chips. And with President Trump hell-bent on maintaining American leadership in AI, and despite the chip restrictions that are in place, Chinese companies seem to be turning hardware challenges into a motivation for innovation that challenges the American lead, something they seem keen to drive home.

R1, for instance, was announced at around the same time as OpenAI’s $500 billion Project Stargate, two impactfully divergent approaches.

What’s happening here is that the market has finally come around to the idea that maybe the cost of AI development (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) is too high, a recognition “that the winners in AI will be the most innovative companies, not just those with the most GPUs,” according to Writer CTA Waseem Alshikh. “Brute-forcing AI with GPUs is no longer a viable strategy.”

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, however, thinks this is just a good time to buy into Nvidia — Nvidia and the rest are building infrastructure that, he argues, China will not be able to compete with in the long run. “Launching a competitive LLM model for consumer use cases is one thing,” Ives wrote. “Launching broader AI infrastructure is a whole other ballgame.”

“I view cost reduction as a good thing. I’m of the belief that if you’re freeing up compute capacity, it likely gets absorbed — we’re going to need innovations like this,” Bernstein semiconductor analyst Stacy Rasgon told Yahoo Finance. “I understand why all the panic is going on. I don’t think DeepSeek is doomsday for AI infrastructure.”

Somewhat relatedly, Perplexity has already added DeepSeek’s R1 model to its AI search engine. And DeepSeek on Monday launched another model, one capable of competitive image generation.

Last week, I said that R1 should be enough to make OpenAI a little nervous. This anxiety spread way quicker than I anticipated; DeepSeek spent Monday dominating headlines at every publication I came across, setting off a debate and panic that has spread far beyond the tech and AI community.

Some are concerned about the national security implications of China’s AI capabilities. Some are concerned about the AI trade. Granted, there are more unknowns here than knowns; we do not know the details of DeepSeek’s costs or technical setup (and the costs are likely way higher than they seem). But this does read like a turning point in the AI race.

In January, we talked about reversion to the mean. Right now, it’s too early to tell how long-term the market impacts of DeepSeek will be. But, if Nvidia and the rest fall hard and stay down — or drop lower — through earnings season, one might argue that the bubble has begun to burst. As a part of this, watch model pricing closely; OpenAI may well be forced to bring down the costs of its models to remain competitive.

At the very least, DeepSeek appears to be evidence that scaling is one, not a law, and two, not the only (or best) way to develop more advanced AI models, something that rains heavily on OpenAI and co.’s parade since it runs contrary to everything OpenAI’s been saying for months. Funnily, it actually seems like good news for the science of AI, possibly lighting a path toward systems that are less resource-intensive (which is much needed!)

It’s yet another example of the science and the business of AI not being on the same page.