Toronto Bathurst College Centre | ?m | 4s | RioCan | Turner Fleischer

W. K. Lis said:
Honest Ed's has pay parking. Eaton's Centre has pay parking.

If all fails, the city had better ask for full commercial property taxes for the parking lot, and pay parking as well. No free parking.
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Agreed. Ideally they'd be also required to build one of their urban versions where the Walmart is on the second floor above parking and street fronting retail. More ambitiously would be to include some residential as well as they have done in DC.
 
picard102 said:
Is WalMart not subject to the same minimum wage standards as everyone else as mandated by the province?



I agree, encourage and support them in adapting too Walmart, or any other competition that may come in.
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Doesn't mean we should promote more of the same, and its more than just the minimum wage that we should take issue with. Adapting to Walmart? That's funny in a sadistic kind of way. Its apples and oranges, one is just a massive orange that likes to crush apples quickly to dominate the local retail economy. They also have incredible purchasing power and can shut out (have) local small retailers to eliminate supply to competition, thus killing other businesses as well as treating their own suppliers like crap as well. The programs mentioned are likely PR bullshit, and their record for the treatment of employees is abysmal for North American standards. Nothing there for me to want to stop boycotting them.

I do agree that if we have to have them, the urban version is definitely preferable to the suburban version. And obviously paid parking only...isn't that one kind of set in stone in an area like this?
 
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I loved Honest Ed's response to this compared to Kensington, especially as Wal-Mart is more of the threat to Honest Ed's than anything else in that area. If you can't compete, you don't deserve to stay in business. From The Star:

Honest Ed’s, the perennially glitzy bargain warehouse, sits north of the site, at Bloor and Bathurst Sts. The potential competitor’s reaction to the Walmart proposal is relatively relaxed.

“We’ve had large stores and small stores go up everywhere around us,” said general manager Russell Lazar, who’s worked at Honest Ed’s since 1958, when he was 7.

“We don’t begrudge anybody that wants to do business,” he said. “It makes you sharper when you have competition.”

The mood is starkly different in Kensington Market, where residents and businesses have been agitating for months against a separate plan to bring in a Loblaw’s grocery store.
 
picard102 said:
Agreed. Ideally they'd be also required to build one of their urban versions where the Walmart is on the second floor above parking and street fronting retail. More ambitiously would be to include some residential as well as they have done in DC.
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I believe this development has Walmart on the second and third floors in the building
 
RC8 said:
Many small independent retailers sell stuff from sweatshops, too. I'm merely addressing the impact in the local economy.

That said, independent retailers and Loblaws could theoretically exist without sweatshops - whereas Wal-Mart couldn't.
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Hello, RC8.

The probability of you venting your anger toward Wal*Mart on this thread was about as high as the probability of seeing a seagull at a garbage dump.

Yeah, yeah, yeah:

Casinos are evil and Toronto would have become like Detroit because they have one.
And, oh, that development slated for the Toronto Star lands is way too tall and will ruin the character of a neighbourhood that is mostly surface parking and onramps.

And, oh, WalMart needs slave labour to survive and to exploit its workers if it is able to sell its junk merchandise at fire sale prices but, oh, that's not true of those independent dollar store retailers in Kensington Market who surely source their merchandise from organic collective farms in Switzerland and give their employees 6 week vacations and 1 year mat leaves.
 
MikeOlivo-Moore said:
Doesn't mean we should promote more of the same, and its more than just the minimum wage that we should take issue with. Adapting to Walmart? That's funny in a sadistic kind of way. Its apples and oranges, one is just a massive orange that likes to crush apples quickly to dominate the local retail economy. They also have incredible purchasing power and can shut out (have) local small retailers to eliminate supply to competition, thus killing other businesses as well as treating their own suppliers like crap as well. The programs mentioned are likely PR bullshit, and their record for the treatment of employees is abysmal for North American standards. Nothing there for me to want to stop boycotting them.
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The trick is not to compete against WalMart but to sell to a different clientele and sell totally different products from WalMart. Will WalMart kill independent dollar stores and purveyors of junk? Sure. Will WalMart kill Bikes on Wheels or Global Cheese? Probably not, because WalMart doesn't stock 1000 varieties of specialty cheese or Dutch hipster bikes. What are the merchants of Kensington market even worried about? If WalMart will kill a local business it'll probably be another big box, chain competitor.
 
Hipster Duck said:
The trick is not to compete against WalMart but to sell to a different clientele and sell totally different products from WalMart. Will WalMart kill independent dollar stores and purveyors of junk? Sure. Will WalMart kill Bikes on Wheels or Global Cheese? Probably not, because WalMart doesn't stock 1000 varieties of specialty cheese or Dutch hipster bikes. What are the merchants of Kensington market even worried about? If WalMart will kill a local business it'll probably be another big box, chain competitor.
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It's WalMart! The most emotional retailer for our generation's soft-left. It's pretty much just a opportunity to bring out Jane Jacobs and Noam Chomsky and moralize against corporations without, you know, actually putting in any effort.

I thinks if community groups actually want to oppose this project, it would be best not to dive off the deep end of whacky anti-Walmart bias and stick to the urban impacts of the proposed development. Last time the City got ginned up against a Walmart it only avoided loosing thanks to employment zoning, with most of the hysterics over Walmart destroying all that we hold dear serving as very loud rabble.

And, yes, I think Chinatown merchants have much more to fear than KM. If the Waverly gets redeveloped combined with the UofT residence, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the junkier businesses between College n Dundas on Spadina get pinched between Walmart poaching their customers and landlords thinking about how to service higher margin people.
 
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Parkdalian said:
People defending Wal-Mart seems so absurd to me. It's like those "Yay! Capitalism!" marches the Objectivists always try to organize. It's like an exercise in butt kissing when the butt is so large it couldn't even feel your lips no matter how hard you pressed.
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Pointing out that 99% of criticisms of WalMart are complete BS isn't kissing ass.

In every significant respect Walmart isn't any different from any other retailer. It's hardly the only shop to sell products with questionable ethical origins. It's labour practices aren't any worse than any other retailer downtown (probably better than many Chinatown stores...) Like, people here criticize it for creating low paid service sector jobs, as if Kensington Market is a hub of blue collar auto workers and USW employees.

It is frustrating that simply mentioning WalMart will elicit so much opinion mongering. It's like a kind of left-wing kabuki where everyone dressed up and feigns moral indignation over WalMart while apparently Honest Eds, which sells all sorts of sweatshop junk, is A-OK.

We might as well ban Amazon.ca from Toronto since it's run all our independent bookstores out of business. Or Newegg.ca for competing with the computer stores in Chinatown. Or the foodtrucks for competing with sit down places. Or or or...

And the one legit criticism of Walmart, that it's usually predicated on soulless power centers, gets lost in all the fuss. This is supposed to be a site dedicated to urban design. Yet all that goes out the window with WalMart as everyone's inner social engineer comes out and starts giving baseless opinions of what kind of jobs downtown 'needs' or what kind of retail other people ought to have.
 
diminutive said:
Pointing out that 99% of criticisms of WalMart are complete BS isn't kissing ass.

In every significant respect Walmart isn't any different from any other retailer. It's hardly the only shop to sell products with questionable ethical origins. It's labour practices aren't any worse than any other retailer downtown (probably better than many Chinatown stores...) Like, people here criticize it for creating low paid service sector jobs, as if Kensington Market is a hub of blue collar auto workers and USW employees.

It is frustrating that simply mentioning WalMart will elicit so much opinion mongering. It's like a kind of left-wing kabuki where everyone dressed up and feigns moral indignation over WalMart while apparently Honest Eds, which sells all sorts of sweatshop junk, is A-OK.

We might as well ban Amazon.ca from Toronto since it's run all our independent bookstores out of business. Or Newegg.ca for competing with the computer stores in Chinatown. Or the foodtrucks for competing with sit down places. Or or or...

And the one legit criticism of Walmart, that it's usually predicated on soulless power centers, gets lost in all the fuss. This is supposed to be a site dedicated to urban design. Yet all that goes out the window with WalMart as everyone's inner social engineer comes out and starts giving baseless opinions of what kind of jobs downtown 'needs' or what kind of retail other people ought to have.
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+1

Another argument one could make is that Toronto, especially downtown, is underserved by retail square footage. Creating additional square footage should actually support independent merchants by theoretically lowering leasing costs. (The market doesn't work as perfectly as that... but its a valid point). The knee-jerk reaction WalMart = bad isn't helpful to the design debate either.
 
Personally don't really care whether it is a Walmart or not - as long as there is finely-grained retail at street level, a built form that reflects such granularity (it doesn't right now) and that parking is minimal (302 is a bit much, on a streetcar route, no less). As it stands right now, the project doesn't cut it yet. T&F build big-box shacks, not real urban-scaled architecture.

AoD
 
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diminutive said:
Pointing out that 99% of criticisms of WalMart are complete BS isn't kissing ass.

In every significant respect Walmart isn't any different from any other retailer. It's hardly the only shop to sell products with questionable ethical origins. It's labour practices aren't any worse than any other retailer downtown (probably better than many Chinatown stores...) Like, people here criticize it for creating low paid service sector jobs, as if Kensington Market is a hub of blue collar auto workers and USW employees.

It is frustrating that simply mentioning WalMart will elicit so much opinion mongering. It's like a kind of left-wing kabuki where everyone dressed up and feigns moral indignation over WalMart while apparently Honest Eds, which sells all sorts of sweatshop junk, is A-OK.

We might as well ban Amazon.ca from Toronto since it's run all our independent bookstores out of business. Or Newegg.ca for competing with the computer stores in Chinatown. Or the foodtrucks for competing with sit down places. Or or or...

And the one legit criticism of Walmart, that it's usually predicated on soulless power centers, gets lost in all the fuss. This is supposed to be a site dedicated to urban design. Yet all that goes out the window with WalMart as everyone's inner social engineer comes out and starts giving baseless opinions of what kind of jobs downtown 'needs' or what kind of retail other people ought to have.
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It's so funny that you call people who disagree with you "social engineers," as if arguing that your environment matches your needs and the needs of your community is a form of blind Stalinism. Sure, plopping a Walmart here might do nothing. But it might do a lot of negative things, and it doesn't need to be here - plenty of us have been getting by with the one at Dufferin. Some of us don't trust the Almighty Market's capacity to always provide the best for us; it's often, it seems plain, capable of making things much worse. To argue that any complaints against Walmart (99% apparently!) are uncalled for seems more closed-minded and simplistic than arguing that Walmart should do whatever it wants. (That's the kissing ass part.) Why not argue for a better, more textured world rather than support the world's largest retailer in its quest for its 8,971st location?

But this whole Walmart thing is probably a blessing in disguise, design- and urban-wise. Riocan could have dropped some other big box store here and it would have been built with a minimal amount of fuss. Now that they are being put under pressure to think about the development's impact on the community, we could see some interesting changes.
 
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