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Originally Posted by esquire
Thinking over this Portage Avenue thing, it's generally agreed that the mid/late 90s were kind of the bottoming out period for downtown Winnipeg [cut] retail has nearly disappeared during that time... Portage Avenue of 1997 was a better shopping street than it is now.
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The changes happening in Winnipeg retail are actually part of a much larger global shift from shops on the streets to direct to consumer websites. In 1997 an idea like Kickstarter was well beyond what most people could imagine. Getting books, movie, music, etc in languages other than English was also extremely uncommon. Now you can easily hit the internet and pull those in. I recall back in the late 90s a routine lunch break would be hitting one of five or more music stores looking for what was new that I could buy. Now it is practically unheard of to buy physical music.
If you travel in the USA there is ghost retail all over the places as the recession of the early 2000s that Manitoba mostly escaped claimed many large retail chains such as Circuit City, Barnes and Noble, and Linen and Things. There is less than zero demand for these places now.
The pandemic has also really hit the accelerator on the shift of groceries from almost exclusively brick and mortar to heavily online business. As we start to move away from the immediate crunch and settle into more of a new normal those retailers are going to have an opportunity to sit back and study their real world test data and find out how to make the permanent shift. I know some people, including many posters here say it won't happen but when things got real they shifted in a hurry. For an extremely price sensitive segment such as grocery shifting from stores to fulfillment centers could provide a meaningful opportunity for cost savings which could be passed along, in part, to consumers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
That's not even getting into the social problems that used to be somewhat restricted to a few north Portage haunts but are now fairly widespread in the area.
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I big part of that is the approach to "solving" the problems downtown is basically show up with a broom and sweep the dirt off the sidewalk in front of your business into the street. The fundamental issue hasn't been corrected, just a highly localized change has happened. One dive bar that is the hot spot for trouble is closed and the customers just move to a different dive bar.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Biff
Shit, I meant the Dayton Building. No wonder I made it confusing. Wow, I really fucked up this conversation.
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Could have been worse. The block that Dreman is on is actually one of the blocks on Portage most primed for something big like Chipman swooping in to do a large scale redevelopment. It would actually have been a better place for True North Square other than the proximity to the arena. Imagine the tall office tower between Fort and Garry on the south side of Portage opening to a courtyard. Residential backing onto Fort with the court yard open towards Graham and Garry. Eventually Wawanessa could have replaced SkyCity, the former Pint and St Reggis. The hotel could have taken the place for where True North Square is located and been connected directly to the arena. The overall impact to downtown might actually have been larger as it would have created a nice cluster of really tall builds close to Portage and Main instead of the gap we have now between Portage and Main and True North Square that will live on forever.
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