TEK Tower (30 Francis) | 45 fl | U/C

[tomh009]

Chocolatier?  Cheesemonger?  Pastry/doughnut shop (bakery elsewhere)?  Florist?  Socks shop?  Tea room/shop?  Travel agency?  Phone/watch repair and accessories?

Doing some very rudimentary back-of-envelope calculations, are any of these economically viable?

For the 20 x 25 boite, selling your widgets, assume rent of $1,000 per month,  wages of $4,800 per month (open 80 hours a week x $15 per hour wage x 4 weeks per month) and $200 other expenses = total monthly expense of $6,000. Assume 
 a 20% mark-up on your widgets, you need to sell $36,000 (20% of 30,000 = $6,000) of widgets per month just to cover this low ball estimate of expenses, or over $1,000 a day.

Presumably the developer has done a far more sophistocated analysis and determined that including these three retail units is a good idea.

The markups can be substantially higher, depending on what you are selling. But you also have inventory costs, accounting, cleaning, utilities, building maintenance etc. I don't think 80h of labour per week is high given that shelves need to be stocked, prices need to be updated, someone needs to go to the bank daily etc. I suspect you would need at least one person getting paid more than the minimum -- and for everyone you need to also pay for CPP and EI contributions, so I think your employment costs would be $6000+, and total costs at least $6500.

But this would be true anywhere, not just downtown. And whether you pay $600/month or $400/month is really a fairly small part of the total costs, and hopefully would not determine the viability of the business.