Years from now, when this pandemic is far enough in the rear-view that we can play “do you remember where you were when COVID-19 hit”, Ross McNeil will have a little story: about how, on the Saturday when people were just starting to realize something monumental was afoot, he was telling his staff at Duggers Men’s Wear, the iconic Halifax store, not to worry about a thing.
And, about how, the next Tuesday morning, he was laying all 18 of them off.
The lockdown has been a mighty challenge for a retailer that only last week re-opened with limited business hours. “But you can’t just lock the door and blame it on COVID,” McNeil told me. “You have to square your shoulders and get to work.”
Particularly when you’re in the middle of picking up your entire business and moving it to a sparkling new venue a block-or-so away.
“We were so far into it when this hit that we wouldn’t have changed our plan,” McNeil said of the move to The Doyle Building, a few blocks down Spring Garden Road from the current location, which was originally slated for June but has now, because of the pandemic, been pushed into the future.
“When your mind-set is entrepreneurial,” he added, “it is hard to look back.”
But talk to him for awhile and you get a sense of the company’s grand narrative: how his late father, Douglas “Dugger” McNeil, the former hockey star and provincial Conservative MLA, opened up his first men’s clothing store at the Bayer’s Road Shopping Centre back in 1971.
And how even their bankers were certain the store would fail when the father-son team decided to move it to Spring Garden Road in 1992 with a new business philosophy.
“We were all fighting it out on the same level at Bayer’s Road,” said McNeil. “We made a distinct decision to go above everybody else (merchandise-wise) so that our competition would be stores from away.”
However, this was still a small market, which meant that Duggers, in his words, “had to be all things to all people.”
So, today a businessman can drop $1,998 on a tailored suit there, but a young man on the way up can buy one for as little as $798, a bargain in the sector of the market in which the business operates, while a recent grad can head to the jeans store downstairs and find something even easier on the wallet.
Yet, everything I know of the store, makes me think that Duggers has always been more than just a place to get nice duds.
Its longevity—while a dozen-or-so men’s clothing stores operated in the city when it moved to Spring Garden only three are still in business—and iconic stature are due to something else.
“We sell the experience,” said McNeil. “We always have. ”
For someone who hasn’t walked through its doors that experience can be hard to explain. The staff is attentive, the setting swanky without being intimidating.
There’s also a vibe, a feeling, that keeps multiple generations of a single family coming back to the store, that makes old boxers visit, and well-heeled folks from the downtown office towers drop in for an after-work cappuccino or perhaps a top-up of something stronger.
“We plan to keep things the same as they’ve been for the past 50 years,” McNeil said of the new two-floor location. “Just a little bit better.”
Some of it, on some level, can be traced back to the personality of the eponymous founder, “not a balance sheet kind of guy” according to his son, but a possessor of legendary people skills “who bent over backwards for every sale” and whose abiding motto was “nobody owes you a living.”
McNeil told me that when his father died in 2015, Halifax senator Wilfred Moore stood in the Senate and recounted how future Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin was once headed to Halifax to make a speech.
But Tobin’s luggage got lost, and it was suppertime on a Saturday, which meant all of the stores in Halifax were closed.
Moore made one call. Though McNeil had just returned from work he headed back to Spring Garden Road, and in a few minutes had Tobin outfitted with a tux ready to hit the podium.
Only later did Moore learn that the well-known Tory had left his own family birthday to help a couple of well-known Grits.
That, McNeil explained, was just his father, the kind of man who used to have a single $6 pair of socks delivered to an old customer in Spryfield because the fellow had been one of his first customers, and Dugger McNeil didn’t forget such things.
