I’m not any good at observing nature, and if it wasn’t for my husband’s weather-watching hobby, I’d wear sweaters in summer, and uselessly carry around an umbrella when it was cloudy. But there is a thing I can observe that moves slow enough and stays large enough to follow… that is the state of urban shopping centres.
Here in the southern-most tip of Winnipeg I am five minutes from St. Vital mall which took one of its largest hits (in my subjective observation) even before the pandemic when Sears shuttered its doors and the mall eventually filled the vacancy with three new tenants: a gym, a Marshall’s and a Home Sense. I recently walked through the mall, my errands too diverse to avoid doing so, and noted the vacancies like missing teeth in a smile: no more La Senza, Thyme Maternity, Build-a-Bear or pretzel place. Gymboree has long since given up its spot to Petland.
Within less than four kilometres of my house there are two Dollarama’s - reminding me a the grim article I read a few years ago on just this subject. (It might have been this one, in Bloomberg.) The ones here replaced Pier 1 Imports and a local grocer.
Maybe less than ten years ago, a new outlet strip mall was set up on Kensaton with stores like Tommy Hilfiger, Reitman’s, and Danier. Storefronts have changed. Just recently one switched from clothing to skin care. But this string of outlet stores face their own extinction since the appearance of the Outlet Collection on Sterling Lyon Parkway. I’m not sure how retailers managed to conclude that this was a wonderful idea, two decades into the 2000’s. I tend to be of the pessimistic opinion that malls are dying or dead, but somehow developers in Winnipeg have declared otherwise. A beautiful mall with sky-high ceilings and aisles that anticipated social distancing before a single bat ever coughed, opened and became part of the landscape like a giant mushroom. It does feel like the final stages of retail, described here as a kind of canabalization.
There’s a time warp though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. You can find articles that say that retail is dying from years ago, and yet things are still being built and bought and sold here. Are we slow? Are the people who note the trend mistaken in their conclusion? Is it a kind of pessimism, or is it that old capitalist ideas are still being clung to? I don’t know… Hence the observations.