MennoMart in Steinbach is closing its doors after three years of providing discount goods to Steinbach and area shoppers.

Manager Steve Denault says after a long wait they were denied charitable status and the ability to give out donations receipts. He adds Revenue Canada has made it very difficult for organizations like to MennoMart to achieve charitable status.

"That's a sad thing, it's going to hurt some people," says Denault.

He says, initially, the focus of the store was on construction materials but when the supply began to dry up, they started bringing in truckloads of mostly brand new, big box store liquidated items which he notes would have otherwise ended up in the landfill.

"I think that's the big piece too is that so much stuff goes into the landfill that people really aren't aware of and we could recycle it," He explains, "I mean, returns are a great example. Many big organizations just put them in the dumpster. They don't want them out there in the business channels anymore so I think we were doing a good thing in that respect and we were offering people new products at half price."

In a release, the non-profit organization says although support from local businesses and the community was good, donors hoped MennoMart would be able to offer donation receipts in exchange for the donated items. 

MennoMart, located on Steinbach's Life Sciences Parkway

"I think the one thing we didn't get, that we maybe thought we would, was lumber or sheet material, and the reality is, those are just not things that contractors and builders will give away, especially if they're not getting a receipt. So that was a big hindrance to the original vision"

Denault adds it also became difficult to find volunteers, willing or capable, to do the heavy lifting when shipments of furniture come in.

"Volunteers were hard to get and harder to get in a situation where everything is bull work," Denault adds, "not a lot of people that have the time, want to go in someone's basement and haul out an old deep freezer."

When looking at the bigger picture, Denault says 42 percent of the population is baby boomer age or over and notes many of them are downsizing, which brings an end to that whole wave of household items to be donated.

Nevertheless, he says their staff and volunteers really enjoyed their time at MennoMart. "It was actually quite fun because we never knew what was going to come out of one of those pallets and people would come in and go 'oh my gosh I had no idea you had stuff like this' and neither did we until we opened the box but yeah there was a lot of diversity."

The non-profit organization will cease operations by the end of May and Denault indicates it was a difficult decision.