The Retail Apocalypse

[ShonTron]

There needs to be more indoor theme parks as well. Woodbine Centre's Fantasy Fair is awfully small for Ontario's largest indoor theme park.

And that mall is dying too - it's in a poor location, and now doesn't have two of its three anchors it had 5 years ago (Zellers and Sears).

 

[DSix]

Malls can redevelop empty spaces, go mixed-use by adding hotels, residential, entertainment centres. That's the future for them.

42

Dead malls don't really seem to be a thing in Canada, but there are tons of the them in the US. It's pretty scary when you see just how many there are in the US - http://deadmalls.com/stories.html

 

[ShonTron]

Oh, dead malls exist in Canada, but Canada was never as over-retailed as much as the United States, and didn't generally see as massive depopulation or economic collapses of the type of inner suburban areas where you see dead malls in the US.

Our dead malls were either failed downtown projects (and Ontario has a lot of these), or smaller malls like Honeydale. Though Woodbine Centre is in danger now, as is Shoppers World Brampton - malls that never kept up.

 

[WislaHD]

At the same time, our mega-malls are thriving like never before.

 

[WislaHD]

Canada's Largest REIT To Shed $2B Worth Of Properties Over Three-Year Period

"RioCan REIT announced plans to sell an estimated 100 retail properties, which will be mostly made up of open-air malls and power centers."

 

[Bruno Republic]

Our dead malls were either failed downtown projects (and Ontario has a lot of these), or smaller malls like Honeydale.

Sometimes these are one and the same. In the late 70s and early 80s, there were many attempts to replicate the success of the Toronto Eaton Centre across the province, scaling them accordingly to the size of the city. Most of the ones in smaller cities flopped, often because there were already bigger and better malls built outside the downtown area. In smaller cities where there is little or no public transit, nearly everyone has a car, and you can drive to almost any place in town in under 15 minutes, there was absolutely no point in going to a small urban-ish mall that offered less of everything.

 

[JasonParis]

Though Woodbine Centre is in danger now, as is Shoppers World Brampton - malls that never kept up.

Though if Woodbine Centre was mothballed and another mall was built almost across the street as part of the Woodbine Live (or whatever it is called now) development, I can see some future life for a mall in the area.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Important to note that even though we are not as overbuilt as the US, we are the second in terms of retail square footage per person.

AoD

 

[PinkLucy]

Malls can redevelop empty spaces, go mixed-use by adding hotels, residential, entertainment centres. That's the future for them.

42

Perhaps look to the US where many malls do this quite successfully.

 

[narduch]

The Toys R Us story is actually kind of sad. It sort of mimics Sears a little bit.

They were bought out by a bunch of private equity firms with loads of debt. And instead of paying off the debt they take out dividends.

They actually make a decent amount of revenue each year. It's lazy to say that they can't cope with the changes in shopping habits.

 

[Skeezix]

[...] It's lazy to say that they can't cope with the changes in shopping habits.

It's the same thing with Sears. Many of the news articles in the past couple of days are full of "experts" going on about "blah blah blah Amazon blah blah blah Walmart blah blah blah failure to innovate blah blah blah slow to move into e-commerce blah blah" - a lot of it is beside the point, or sometimes just plain wrong. It's basically the same quotes they use whenever any retailer goes under or retrenches. It's like they are interviewing people who haven't paid any attention to Sears Canada since the 1990s, or (more likely) the journalists are creatively quoting the interviewees to feed a narrative.

 

[DSix]

Oh, dead malls exist in Canada, but Canada was never as over-retailed as much as the United States, and didn't generally see as massive depopulation or economic collapses of the type of inner suburban areas where you see dead malls in the US.

Our dead malls were either failed downtown projects (and Ontario has a lot of these), or smaller malls like Honeydale. Though Woodbine Centre is in danger now, as is Shoppers World Brampton - malls that never kept up.

I wouldn't really consider Honeydale a "mall" in the same sense as the dead malls you see in america. Honeydale was built as a community mall with one major tenant occupying the majority of the footprint of this mall. It was doomed to fail being in such close proximity to Cloverdale and the Sherway Gardens area and is more an example of extreme over retailing in a very small area.

 

[Johnny Au]

See here: http://www.businessinsider.com/amaz...sends-best-buy-stock-price-plunging-10-2017-9

Best Buy's shares dropped by 10% (equivalent to US$1.7 billion) on September amid competition from Amazon.

GameStop (the parent company of EB Games) is closing at least 150 locations in the United States by the end of the year, due to fewer purchases of physical software, along with fewer purchases of accessories; even the extremely popular Nintendo Switch was unable to save the store.

 

[JasonParis]

Honeydale will also easily be redeveloped, as opposed to many of the dead and/or zombie malls across the U.S.

 

[Admiral Beez]

There's also strong rumours right now that HBC may be putting an end to Sak's entry in Canada early in 2018. The stores are underperforming massively.

I like shopping at the HBC on Queen St., but whenever I walk in now, it seems like the place is confused, like when Tims and Wendys combined locations.