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Old Posted Oct 28, 2011, 1:45 AM
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I am a typical
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Thunder Bay
Posts: 41,172
The mall in the neighbourhood where I grew up could probably be declared dead now. Its website was recently blanked. The grocery store closed on Tuesday. Its only anchor is now the Zellers, which will close in 8 months to become a Walmart. There is a Shoppers Drug Mart inside that will close in about two weeks when a larger location opens a kilometre away.

Aside from Zellers and Shoppers, the only other tenants in what was once a 45 tenant mall are a public library (which is considering a new location in the area), a government services office/UPS store/lottery shop (its all one store, kind of odd), a BMO, a laundromat, a barber shop, a Robin's Donuts, and some health care offices that are only in the mall until their new facility is built downtown. The roof leaks all over. Also on that site is an abandoned Home Hardware (closed because it was falling apart), a small building that now houses just a TD Bank (used to have a Robin's and a dental office in it), and a gas station. A neighbouring hotel development which has about a dozen stores in it is doing just fine.

The Zellers is one of two Zellers locations in the city that will become a Walmart soon. It seems pretty obvious that the whole site will be razed and a new Walmart will be built there. Walmart will own the land directly below the existing Zellers, and it is no secret that one of the owners of the mall itself desperately wants to sell. (The other owner wants to restore the mall to what it once was; the second largest in the city.)

Considering this mall is beside one of our busiest intersections, at the point where all Trans-Canada traffic crosses (it used to bill itself as the "last chance for anything for 600km"), in the city's fastest growing neighbourhood, the fact that it is seeing a nearly 90% vacancy rate and facing demolition speaks of how bad its management is.

The other Zellers-to-Walmart conversion in a mall near the Airport will be a simple renovation/re-branding of the store. That mall was pretty shitty a few years ago, but its owner (the half-owner of the dead mall that wants to restore the mall) put in a lot of investment and now it is 100% occupied, like that owner's other two properties. Three of our four smaller once-dead malls have been brought back from the dead.
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