Grouse River shutting down

Trevor Nichols - Jul 07, 2017 - Biz Releases

A Kelowna store catering to hunting and outdoor enthusiasts is “closing down operations” amid minor controversy.

Grouse River has been operating in Kelowna for about a decade, but in March closed the brick-and-mortar side of its business for what company representative Maciek Wronski said were renovations.

The plan, according to Wronski, was for Grouse River to refocuses its business on its “core hunting and shooting customers,” and operate as an online retailer while the shift happened.

That appeared to be playing out until last week, when, shortly after the company announced a blowout sale, customers began having issues with their orders.

Brenndon Goodman was one of those customers.

He says he ordered about $800 worth of merchandise during the deep-discount sale, but a week after the order still hadn’t heard anything from the company, even though the charges were pending on his credit card.

“I’ve been trying to get in contact with them about the order and I can’t call them, I can’t reach them online, all their social media accounts are dead, I can’t reach anything,” he said, adding that he had never had a problem with the company in the past.

On an online forum where Grouse River has a strong presence, several other customers have complained of similar problems, saying they weren’t sure what was happening with their orders and couldn’t get in touch with anyone from the company.

It now appears those issues were at least partly due to Grouse River’s looming closure.

According to Grouse River representative Ryan Wuest, much of the backup customers have been complaining about was due to the Canada Day long weekend.

Grouse River got about 1,000 orders during the sale, he said, but staff were given an extended, five-day break over the holiday.

“We’re just playing catch up,” he said.

He said the team continues to work through its backlog of orders, and that “a lot” of people will get their items over the next few days. He couldn’t say for sure, however, that everyone would.

Wuest said Grouse River is “going to the path of closing down operations,” and will be fulfilling online orders for the next couple of weeks as things wind down.

“I can’t guarantee everyone’s going to get their orders, because I don’t know if I’m going to have the stock that they ordered,” he said. “But obviously they only get charged for what we shipped them.”

Wuest suggested Grouse River customers who placed orders and don’t get their product have nothing to worry about, because they can always cancel the purchase if it doesn’t show up.

“There’s a thing called chargebacks. No one who buys anything on credit cards is going to get burned,” he said.

Wuest said it’s been hard for customers to get in touch with Grouse River because the company has been forced to scale back its customer service staff.

“Is it hard to get a hold of us right now? Yes it is. We’re a massively smaller company, and we’ve cut back on our customer service side of it just because we have to,” he said.

The company’s Facebook page, active only a few days ago, also appears to have completely disappeared.

Wuest said the company has been working to turn things around over the past two years, but a confluence of tough competition, the weak Canadian Dollar and technical issues have all conspired against it.

“Financially it didn’t make sense. We tried to work with our partners … but unfortunately there’s just a lot of outside forces,” he said. “We’ve tried to work through it the best we can … to try to turn the ship around, but unfortunately sometimes the momentum is just going in the wrong direction.”