[Burnaby] Metropolis at Metrotown Redevelopment (Downtown Burnaby)

[SpongeG]

I was at metropolis last week and the Toys R US was still open there.

The mall has really been putting in quite impressive displays and interactive activities and such in their Grand Court area, currently they have an under the sea kind of theme going on, I found a pic of their recent spring theme, they had a really cool dragon for Chinese New Year recently too. They should add a big screen in there now.


wikimedia.org

the dragon

burnabynow


burnabynow

[Spr0ckets]

Originally Posted by jollyburger

I don't think they've relocated yet? It stills show them as open on Google Maps and on the Metropolis website.

Originally Posted by Changing City

The company website shows two stores in Burnaby, one at Metropolis at Metrotown, and one at Station Square.

Originally Posted by SpongeG

I was at metropolis last week and the Toys R US was still open there.

.....

Huh.

I was pretty certain it was closed.

So I did some digging and you are correct, that it is indeed open.
However.....

They did close during the Pandemic, and at the time the thought was that it was permanent closure with the impending Concord redevelopment plans looming.
But they re-opened and the understanding is that the current mall location is more of a "pop-up" situation and the new Station Square store is the long-term Metrotown location (And Burnaby?) going into the future.

The mall location sits under the old Sears store, which means its tenancy is under Concord Pacific (since they bought Sears, obviously....) and not Ivanhoe Cambridge, and because of Concord's redevelopment plans for Phase 2 of it's Metrotown towers, that section of the mall will be demolished once they begin that phase. At a minumum I imagine the old Sears location (and ToysR'Us spot) will serve as staging for the Phase 2A towers as they begin construction of those before they finish the Phase 2B Office and Rental tower.

I also found out that the Parent company of Toys R'Us essentially bought out the leases of Bed, Bath And Beyond locations, which of course went belly up not that long ago.
The plan being to move some of their locations into the much larger Bed, Bath stores - like the Station Square location in this instance.

It just happens in this case that the leases for the two store locations overlapped with the expiring mall lease requiring them to still operate there (?), while they're relocating most all their operations to Station Square which will be their new permanent location once the mall lease expires.
I guess they just didn't want to cancel the mall lease altogether and saw some benefit to keeping it open as a pop-up (especially since that's the location most people are still familiar with) while they establish the new base at Station Square.