Quote:
Originally Posted by Loco101
It's very hard to find classy shopping in North America today. Up until the late 2000s you could find it even in smaller cities like where I live. We used to have Bucovetsky's which was started by an immigrant Russian-Jewish family. It had three floors and had formal and casual clothing, footwear, housewares, food products, kitchenware and other things. The employees were top-notch, always dressed up and friendly. It was just so nice to have the store as a local option.
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It depends what you mean by a "classy shopping experience". In smaller cities, I definitely agree that things are worse. It's not just online shopping, but deindustrialization and the collapse of medium-sized family-run companies based out of small towns. Those companies usually supported a few dozen, very well-paid senior managers and their families who, when combined with the low cost of living in these towns, had a lot of disposable income on their hands and they shopped locally.
In big cities, I think that upscale shopping options have never been better. Bloor-Yorkville and Yorkdale mall have all the luxury brands you'd expect in New York or Paris, and there's a lot of independent boutiques selling upscale clothes along Queen West and Ossington that didn't exist a generation ago.
Some things have changed just because both tastes and business models have changed. A tailored suit is not something everyone needs to have in their wardrobe anymore, but if you want one, you can get one made fairly cheaply by visiting a showroom like Indochino or Suit Supply where they take your measurements and have the suit made-to-measure in Asia. There are also traveling suit salesmen based out of Hong Kong that rent conference rooms in hotels in major cities across Canada for about a week a year where they show you fabric swatches, take your measurements and, make the suit somewhere in Asia to ship to you directly.
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