[CoryB]

1. If you are putting groceries in the Bay downtown its main floor or bust. Yes, when there were other things in the building the basement made sense but with a blank slate it makes more sense to be the main floor as you have customers with fairly heavy loads. They aren't stopping on the main floor to say browse Winners on their way out. The opposite would be true though, someone coming down from a second floor Winners and going through the grocery store might pick something up along the way.

2. Off price clothing retail has repeatedly been tried downtown and just fails to connect. Putting a different banner on the store isn't suddenly going to make it work.

3. The parking idea seems dead in the water. The Bay parkade literally next door seems to lack the demand needed even at peak times. That means any parking in the Bay building is likely going to be at lower market rates making it more difficult to recover the costs.

4. The one thing in recent years that had large volumes of people going to the Bay is Third and Bird. The farmers market at Hydro is also very popular. Perhaps some sort of model with an emphasis towards food vendors in summer but having smaller independently operated stalls would work. Sort of the "year round farmers market" people keep talking about but acknowledging that in the cold months there isn't really local produce. Might almost make sense to have a non-profit operating a larger market and purchasing produce/meat/eggs/etc from local producers and then selling it on their behalf. Great care would need to go in that in warm months it would be only local stuff and then in cold months only bringing in non-local when necessary. The basement could even be used to grow greens and act as cold storage for out of season root crops. The second floor could then be small stall local vendors. Sort of like The Forks Market when it first started out before it turned into just another mall.