Now Wholesale Sports is closing down. They needed to build nice pretty looking stores when blocks of strip mall space lay vacant. They needed to carry excessive inventory with an extravagant in store merchandising effort and little public promotion. I think retailers in Western Canada need to rethink the way they do business before Amazon sucks up the whole space and governments better get on board with business before urban centres become boarded up black holes.
As I write this, the Marlborough mall in North East Calgary has no less than six closed retailers in the one wing which used to host Sears. Part of the blame must go to the mall for failing to exercise flexibility in a newer retail environment. Given what merchants are paying for mall space, it seems obvious that the only companies that can make it work are the well financed large establishments which can cross fund from multiple geographic outlets.
Amazon is a success story. I use them and they’ve never let me down. In fact, cities across North America as we speak are clamouring for the opportunity to be chosen as Amazon’s “second headquarters”. What is to become of strip malls and shopping malls if a business friendly environment is not provided to bricks and mortar retail establishments across Canada? Perhaps, they should be shuttered? Perhaps, there’s a social kind of slant on “going to the mall” which we want to uphold? I don’t think I really know the answer for sure but it seems that the destruction of malls in favour of an alternate use may be net negative in terms of economic utility.