(Eaton) Lofts at 276

[MidTowner]

Nation’s, a small (four or five locations if I recall correctly) grocery store chain from the GTA opened a location in Jackson Square in downtown Hamilton in 2013. It’s a 55,000 square foot supermarket. It caters to Asian communities (like a B&T or similar) so has a wide selection of “ethnic” foods in particular Asian foods, but a similar selection in most categories as the national chains. When they opened the outlet, they paid lip service to the condo and apartment developments going on lately in downtown Hamilton (which are arguably not that extensive), but the real strategy is serving people who work downtown. The prepared food section takes up a lot of floor space- they have almost a mini-cafeteria as part of it. If you go at 4:00 or 4:30 on a weekday, there are a lot of obviously white collar workers picking up two or three bags of groceries before heading home.

It was a big deal, by the way, when Nation’s decided to locate in Jackson Square, and a surprise to many people. Downtown Hamilton was a much more extensive food desert than downtown Kitchener is.

I expect that this is the likeliest outcome for downtown, but possibly on a bit of a smaller scale: a grocery store with a wide variety of prepared foods being peddled to office workers on lunch, and hoping to sell some of them some groceries before they leave downtown. Viewfromthe42 is right that someone may want to get ahead of residential growth, and they’ll depend on employees in the meantime.