Bigger, better and brighter (10 photos)
Thursday, March 14, 2013 by: Darren Taylor
It’s bigger, better and brighter.
Those are the best words to describe the completely renovated Shoppers Drug Mart in Cambrian Mall.
The store will celebrate its official grand reopening at 8 am on Saturday March 16, while Thursday marked what store management called “the soft opening.”
Renovations started on the store in July, yet the outlet remained open for business all along.
Gregory Cummings, pharmacist and owner of the Shoppers Drug Mart Cambrian Mall location, told SooToday.com major construction ended in January, “but we’ve been putting the finishing touches on everything. Yesterday the staff was great. Everybody came in and worked hard and got everything completed.”
The store’s main exterior entrance and exit, facing west to Great Northern Road, is new and surrounded by plenty of glass, which floods the interior of the store with outside light.
Smaller interior entrances and exits, as before, still provide access to Cambrian Mall.
“We’ve expanded our pharmacy department,” Cummings said.
“It will better enable us to provide frontline health care services, help residents of the community manage their medications, manage chronic conditions, understand health risks and drug interactions, provide them with counseling on their medications and over the counter products.”
“It’s a whole new pharmacy design.”
Cummings told us Shoppers Drug Mart has hired 30 new employees, full-time and part-time, to staff the store.
In addition to a larger pharmacy, there is an expanded food section and a new, expanded cosmetics department, branded as an upscale beauty boutique.
Beauty Boutique Manager Lana Grawbarger, speaking to us about her department’s new look, said “I love it. We all love it. We’re in love! It’s beautiful, it feels glamorous in here.”
“We now have a bigger range of cosmetic brands. Every brand we have is considered a prestige brand,” Grawbarger said, listing off brands such as Lancome, Clinique, Bourjois, Clarins and Stila.
The Beauty Boutique will be offering free makeovers from 10am to 4pm Saturday.
Grawbarger said “we’re giving our appointments 40 minutes for a makeover, so it’s going to be a really good complimentary makeover.”
“We’ll have a gift basket draw every hour, from eight o’clock to four o’clock. When you spend 50 dollars in the Beauty Boutique, you’ll get a free goodie bag with your purchase, full of cosmetics, perfumes, and skin care products.”
Also Saturday, there will be free samples from the store food section, free shopping bags to the first 1500 customers and draws for other prize packages.
Sault Ste. Marie MP Bryan Hayes and City Councillor Pat Mick will be on hand for Saturday morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony.
