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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A seven-year project is about to come to fruition for one Yellowknife business owner.

Shoppers Drug Mart will open in its new location on 49 Street on Sept. 25. A grand opening celebration is scheduled two days later.

Darryl Dolynny, owner of Shoppers Drug Mart, stands inside the Beauty Boutique waiting to be stocked in the new Shoppers building on 49 Street. The new location is set to open to the public on Sept. 25. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

"This was not dreamed overnight," said Darryl Dolynny, owner of Shoppers Drug Mart, speaking in his office in the back of the current Shoppers, in the Panda II Mall on 48 Street. "This took me about seven years, almost to the day of the opening."

The store will nearly triple in size to 15,000 square feet from 5,800 square feet. While sections like the boutique, pharmacy and post office will undergo substantial expansions, there will be new areas as well, like a confectionery.

"Well be moving into frozen foods, bread and processed meat," said Dolynny.

There will also be four digital photo development kiosks.

"They're going to be extremely user-friendly," he said.

Meanwhile, the post office will double in size and have an additional 100 to 150 mailboxes for rent.

As for the pharmacy, "There will be a lot more opportunity for patient consulting. There's a lot more privacy. I think people will receive it really well."

The cosmetic section will feature new lines previously not offered by the Yellowknife Shoppers, Dolynny added.

"We lobbied very, very hard with a lot of vendors down south which were never here before," he said while giving Yellowknifer a tour of his new store, which is currently under 24-hour security as Shoppers employers move quickly to stock the shelves - all of the shelves are brand new - and as construction workers complete the exterior of the building, which should be finished within two weeks.

When Dolynny's first took over the store in 1992, he had about 18 staff. The store currently employs 38 people. When the 49 Street location opens, that number will increase to about 55 - half of them full-time, the other half part-time.

"We started bringing in staff over the summer, with some training down south," said Dolynny.

As the new Shoppers is completed over the next month, the old one will be host to numerous clearance sales and changes.

"The old store is not going to be as top notch as we normally expect over the next couple of weeks," he said. "You're going to see a wavering of service levels a bit just because a lot of the stuff we have now we're not reordering for the new store."

Dolynny estimated that about 85 per cent of the work done on the new store - whether it falls under construction or the supply of materials - was conducted by Northern businesses.

Neils Konge, owner of Konge Construction, the primary contractor on the site, said it was the biggest project his company has yet undertaken.

Eighty per cent of the spending Kong Construction did over the past year went to the Shoppers project, spread among many subcontractors.

"The project accounted for 25 to 40 per cent of our manpower," Konge added.