Quote:
Originally Posted by JHikka
Better not to focus on attaining corporate franchises and instead focus on fostering local, community-driven ventures instead. There might not be any fancy new chains in Saint John but there's a very nice Chinese grocery store now Uptown, and many convenience stores are shifting more towards tiny Korean grocery store offerings. Those didn't exist ten years ago and represent the changing diversity of grocery options available to locals.
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Retail has become a lot less important than in the past too. People in LA are ordering the same Amazon stuff as people in Boise these days. Then there's a growing blight of luxury retail that's generic and pointless unless you want to signal that you have lots of money to burn. I find the high end areas of a lot of cities, full of businesses you don't find in Atlantic Canada, all feel the same and are boring.
I think even a lot of food stuff has been relatively "democratized" lately. As with luxury retail there's a kind of restaurant that's expensive but not that great. The biggest/best food cities will have the more breadth of good places but smaller places can still have lots of good ones.
And the reality is that people living in say the GTA are not traveling around the whole region every week going to different places. They tend to settle into a local area (east vs. west, 905 vs. 416) most of the time that's much closer in scale to a medium sized city.