London Drugs will open in old Woodward's building
London Drugs is the first retail outlet to commit publicly to the new redevelopment at the old downtown Vancouver Woodward's site.
The B.C.-based Western Canadian chain will open a 33,878-square-foot, two-level store at the site in the fall of 2009. Both the main-floor and second-floor sections will contain approximately 17,000 square feet.
In size, it will be on a par with some of the newer outlets in the 66-store chain.
Construction will begin this fall.
In a telephone interview, London Drugs president Wynne Powell said there is always a risk in moving into any new neighbourhood, but he feels confident that his store's foothold in a revitalized Downtown Eastside is the right one. He said a major food store and a bank are committed to the redevelopment, although neither party has gone public with its plans.
"When we agreed to go into this revitalization, we wanted to make sure there was an attractive enough traffic in this area to make sure Woodward's comes back as a business success," said Powell.
"When you look at other areas of Vancouver, you see that when people work together as a team there are profound changes that come to a neighbourhood, and we believe that will happen here."
London Drugs joins Simon Fraser University in committing to the redevelopment.
The new store will have all the departments that other London Drugs outlets contain, including pharmacy, photographic services, consumer electronics, health and beauty, computers, audio-visual equipment and food. It will have a specially designed area for kitchenware, a computer repair department, and a photo-finishing centre, which is somewhat surprising in this age of digital cameras.
"Four or five years ago, we invested multimillions of dollars in state-of-the-art photo finishing equipment, and we believe there's a future in printing photographs," said Powell.
"As people take digital photographs, they're coming back to print them on photographic paper.
"If you have a computer failure and you lose all your baby pictures and no longer have them because you didn't back them up - if you've printed them on archival paper it protects them for generations to come."
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...7600de&k=83852