[omro]

Originally Posted by bigguy1231

If you want to bring alot of people into the area, convert the mall into a Wal-mart. Like it or not it would be a huge catalyst for commercial and residential developement in the area.

While I'm still inclined to feel that the city missed a trick when it decided not to buy the HCC, I don't agree with the wal-mart idea.

It's lowest common denominator thinking, which is all very well and good, but Hamilton's town centre, with its mix of dollar stores, payday loans, discount clothing, and similar store frontage already caters for that and what a brilliant job that's doing of making the town centre a draw for people with more money to spend. We need to raise the bar in the downtown, not keep it low.

You have to remember that certain types of people attract certain types of people and those same types of people repel others. The more low income people you have in one place as a cluster, the fewer moderate to high income people will go there.

For JS to succeed as a mall, it needs to have a major facelift, both inside and out. It needs to be a proper mall, with a wider range of names and brands. Limeridge is the most successful mall in the area, no? Look at the diversity of names and brands there vs JS. JS needs to be bigger and brighter inside, I still like my idea of taking out the roof terrace park and slotting in a two storey modern mall with lots of skylights. JS needs to be closed, emptied, gutted, redone, new tenants attracted and relaunched. A full scale relaunch has often done wonders for brands and shops.

Since that might never happen, perhaps there could be a way to even have small boutique spaces initially (HCC anyone?) representing those brands that people normally find in malls, to encourage people to go there from the downtown rather than going to Limeridge. Perhaps these could offer, beyond just a limited selection on display, a some way to see more of the clothing range and have it delivered there to collect (catalogue shopping is very popular in the UK, Tesco introduced catalogue shopping at most of it's larger stores, order one day, come back and collect with your next shop).

Another UK example, this Mall (Wikipedia entry) failed miserably as a classic Mall. Total flop. I can remember going there when it was a Mall, it was dead, no one could be bothered to go there, because it was just too samey. Then is closed, was redeveloped and reopened as a designer outlet centre. It's packed now.