Ken Moser saying farewell to “a great career”

Ken Moser has been excited to go to work every day for the past 43 years. He loves his job, and it shows. But now he says that, at 75, it’s time to move on.

Moser owns Huntsville’s Canadian Tire franchise and on October 5 he and his wife Gail, who has been quietly and diligently working alongside Ken in the background for all of those years, will hand over the keys to new owner Ian McEwen.

Ken bought his first Canadian Tire store in 1973 after a friend asked him how his then-marketing job was going. “I said, ‘Well, it’s okay,’ and he said, ‘In your wildest dreams, what would you like to do?’ My dream was to own a Canadian Tire store, so he said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ The next morning I was on the phone and it went from there.”

And it’s been a great career. “I love retail. My wife says I need to take a day off,” he laughs. “If I’m in town, I’m at the store, seven days a week and I still do all the ordering for the store at night.”

His excitement for the business shows. His eyes light up when he gives me a tour of the warehouse and we come to a bin of light bulbs set to go on sale soon.

“It’s exciting to see how things are selling and what you can do with a product at different times of year by moving it up into a hot spot. It’s all in how you present it and that’s the real excitement of retail.”

But it’s the people he’ll miss the most – the 80 staff members, some of whom have been there since he bought the store. On our tour, he greets almost all of them by name and shares a quick laugh with a few. “I’m going to miss the people here. That’s going to be one of the tough parts. I know pretty well most of the team and they do a great job.”

Ken is proud that his team will remain intact after he’s gone – a new owner will sometimes bring staff from a previous store to help them get up and running. That’s not happening in this case. “That’s really important to me. This is my team and they run a great facility and it’s nice to know that no one is leaving. It’s nice to leave on a high with everything working well.”

He bought the Fort Frances Canadian Tire store in 1973. He and Gail – who have been married 52 years – planned to stay for three years but were there for 17. They eventually built a new store there and then when the Huntsville store became available jumped at the chance to buy it. They took over the Brendale Square location in 1990 and soon after built the store’s current location. It has since been expanded to its current 38,000 square feet and undergone several renovations.

This 1992 sketch of Gail and Ken Moser commemorates their new Canadian Tire location

But he hasn’t just run this store well. Ken has been involved in helping to shape the Canadian Tire Corporation’s distribution, trucking, warehousing and inventory systems. He’s trained 149 other dealers from across Canada – one of them his son Doug who owns a Canadian Tire in Mississauga, his fourth location compared to Ken’s two. “He phoned me and he said, ‘Dad, you only moved once didn’t you?’ And I said ‘Yeah, just once’, and he said, ‘You’re not so dumb after all’. It was one of his best comments.”

At his last training session on September 1, the company presented him with a framed graphic showing by the numbers just how much his training has impacted the company. It was an emotional moment, Ken says, but he didn’t miss the humour in one of the lines – the number of times he was contacted by cell phone: 0. “I’ve managed so far without one – I have one but it just sits in my drawer.”

Canadian Tire gave Ken Moser a certificate of thanks showing the impact his training has had on the company

Ken’s been a big supporter of the Huntsville community, too, in particular the hospital, the beginnings of the Huntsville Festival of the Arts, and, currently, The Table Food Bank to which they contribute $10,000 annually. And he was instrumental in the beautification of King William Street over the past 10 years.

Retirement will be busy, Ken thinks. He’s looking forward to having time to do some of the things he hasn’t had as much time to do as he’d like: see their three kids and six grandkids more often, spend time at their cabin near Fort Frances or down in Arizona in the winter, go golfing and fishing, and spend more time cleaning up his own property.

But, always, he’ll hold Canadian Tire and its people near to his heart. “It’s been a great career. I still get up every morning ready to get at it,” he says. “I have mixed feelings about retiring because I love the business so much, but it’s time.”

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