03-03-2020, 04:20 PM
(03-03-2020, 02:27 PM)tomh009 Wrote: King Centre's failure was more than 20 years ago, I doubt it will impact anyone. There are some larger spaces, such as the corner of King St W and Water St, and there will be more, although most will not be directly on King St, or they will be outside the Victoria St to Cameron St stretch. But even if a chain such as Best Buy or Sportchek were to open a DTK store, it would likely be an urban-format one with a smaller selection than they have in the suburban malls.
Better would be stores that can be smaller, and that don't duplicate the ones in the malls. Uniqlo, Muji, Mango, Flying Tiger, Patagonia etc.
The Old Eaton building space is on the bigger side for sure, but has been available for close to a year now with no tenant. I am fine with urban formats of those types of stores I actually prefer that style. Unfortunately I just don't see them looking at downtown Kitchener as a place to they want to expand. We can't even get a urban format grocery store. Would love for all those types of retailers to open up in downtown. I don't see a issue with duplication of store that exist in suburban malls. I think this is a big blind spot of retailers today. I think there are a combination of 3 types of shoppers, those who prefer Online, those who prefer downtown core and those who prefer suburban parking lot. I would shop at some of the "box type" stores if they existed in an urban format downtown, but i am not driving through the sea of traffic light on fairway to get to a sportchek. I prefer in person, but since moving back to the region from Toronto I have been shopping mostly online.
Having said all that I still prefer independent unique store like you find on Queen west in Toronto.
Sorry off topic and probably better for another thread. Back to the Mayfair. Looking forward to how this building turns out.