A handful of staff at department store Trimingham Brothers received their marching orders or were offered early retirement this week as the store moves into the final stages of taking over arch rival A & E Smiths.

Between about eight and nine staff will lose their posts, a move blamed on duplication of roles because of the merger, which is almost complete.

?It is a very difficult thing,? said Lawrence Trimingham, president of the store. ?It is not something I am happy about at all, but with the two stores unifying it has to be done to make sure the two companies are strong enough to go forward.?

On Monday Mr. Trimingham told staff there would have to be job cuts due to the merger of the staff from the two department stores. The newly amalgamated stores will have a total number of staff up to 270 after the job cuts.

Mr. Trimingham said that he hoped that the job cuts would resolve the problems short term, but long term said he hoped that the numbers at the department store would grow as the joint store prospered. He also said that while paperwork to complete the sale had not been fully finished, the majority of the hand-over papers had been signed and the deal would shortly be officially completed.

Mr. Trimingham said that work to punch holes through one store to the other would begin in the New Year and a plan to join the two stores properly had begun. Chris Trimingham, the vice president of the company, is now in charge of the physical joining of the stores and will be overseeing the works that will take place next year.

Mr. Trimingham said that he regretted the layoffs, but hoped that it would make the stores stronger so that they would have a brighter future. He added: ?But it will be a long process.?

He said that so far things were going as planned and the details of the merger were being worked out with new computerised tills being brought in to ease the transition. ?Right now there are meetings every day to discuss the combination of the stores,? said Mr. Trimingham. ?There are all kinds of things we have to take into account.?

The on-again, off-again deal has taken four years of arduous negotiations to get this far. Every summer rumours surfaced of a buy-out of Smith?s by one of the other retail giants surfaced, with Gibbons Company and AS Cooper & Sons Ltd. also named along with Trimingham?s.

An ageing department store, Smith?s had been suffering for years from a decline in tourism and residents shopping abroad and on the Internet and was in need of both a facelift and a cash injection.

Then on July 29, 2003, a deal was finally announced. With a great deal of fanfare, Trimingham?s announced it had bought out Smith?s for an undisclosed amount and would, in effect, take over the Front Street store. But in the middle of September, the two companies issued a joint Press release saying that, although shareholders from each had worked hard to bring the businesses together, they regretted that they were ?unable to complete the transaction?.

The multi-million dollar deal had been put on hold in September due to financial complications.

The deal was initially scrapped because of alleged problems raising finances to complete it ? but neither party would speak to the specifics of what issues had caused the collapse at the time.

But now the deal should be finalised soon, two months after it was slated to be signed and sealed and the combination of the two shops will create a huge retail complex spanning three buildings along Queen and Front streets.