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AMERICAN_PSYCHO

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Sunday, 09/30/2007 9:07:17 AM

Sunday, September 30, 2007 9:07:17 AM

WiseBuys retail chain forges ahead with plans to open Hamilton, N.Y., store.
From: Watertown Daily Times (Watertown, NY) Date: September 9, 2004

Byline: Martha Ellen

Sep. 9--WiseBuys will open its fifth store this fall in Hamilton.

"We're shooting for early November," company Chief Financial Officer Thomas W. Scozzafava said. "We feel pretty confident we can open by then. We've been working on this for a few months. We signed a lease about a month and a half ago."

WiseBuys, which has headquarters in Gouverneur, will open the new store in the village that is home to Colgate University.

Like all of the company's other stores -- in Canton, Gouverneur, Tupper Lake and Pulaski -- WiseBuys will move into what had been an Ames store. After declaring bankruptcy, Ames closed all of its stores nationwide in 2002.

The new store will share a small plaza with a Tops Market on Route 12B just north of the central business district.

Hamilton, about 35 miles southeast of Syracuse, is outside of the geographic area WiseBuys has favored. But the company liked the presence of the university, the availability of the real estate, the demographics and the community effort to attract the store, Mr. Scozzafava said.

WiseBuys, which opened its first store in Canton in September 2003, is faring well, Mr. Scozzafava said.

Road work in Pulaski, which featured half-hour traffic delays, hurt sales for a short while.

"It definitely didn't help," Mr. Scozzafava said. "That was just a short-term disruption. Generally, we're very pleased with the performance. We're really gaining."

The company continues to be interested in locating its stores in other communities, including Saranac Lake, where it lost out on an opportunity to take over a former Ames.

"Real estate's always the issue up there, lack thereof," Mr. Scozzafava said. "Forty-thousand-square-foot buildings are expensive to build. We want to keep our options open."

To see more of the Watertown Daily Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wdt.net.

(c) 2004, Watertown Daily Times, N.Y. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

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