Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
So I am following a little bit of a kerfuffle in Quebec City via my Facebook friends and relatives there.
Quebec City is a very suburbanized sprawly city but with a pretty strong core as well. As it turns out most of my friends and relatives who live there are inner city people and are quite feisty and anti-suburban in many cases.
Anyway, Mountain Equipment Coop have announced that they are moving from their inner city digs (in Nouveau St-Roch - more on this later) to a more suburban location with lots of parking of course. The new store will be in the vicinity of the new Centre Vidéotron arena. So not really in the outer suburbs, and not far from downtown. But still in an auto-dependent environment.
This is seen like a betrayal of sorts by many. MEC was one of the key players in the revitalization of the St-Roch neighbourhood, and the coop played up this fact.
Note that most MEC locations AFAIK tend to be in inner city locations. In Montreal they have one right on the Plateau. Toronto's is right downtown. Ottawa's is in the hip Westboro inner city area.
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That's a little worrisome for Winnipeg... they opened a store here about 15 years ago when Glen Murray led one big final push for new downtown retail... the late lamented A&B Sound and Staples were other large-format retailers that opened up downtown around that time, with no other new ones since.
MEC is on Portage Avenue across from the MTS Centre in a strip that used to be the retail heart of Winnipeg but now offers little more than dollar stores and used bookshops. They do seem like a fish out of water in their current location (parking is not convenient, for one thing) and it's not hard to imagine their sales would increase significantly if they moved a little further out closer to their competition and their client bases.
If they're doing it in Quebec then they must be thinking about doing it here too... I don't love it but I can certainly understand why.