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Mississauga Slim

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Recently, you may have noticed, HMV cut the retail floorspace of its Yonge St store in half. HMV has announced that it is shrinking its retail presence in general in all its markets. Other record stores of course, have disappeared entirely. It seems clear that the record store is an endangered retail species as the physical product becomes obsolete.

Now, a similar thing appears to be happening to bookstores with the advent of electronic readers like the kindle. Already, Borders in the US has gone out of business. Retail chains in Canada may soon be feeling the strain.

Another area where physical product is becoming obsolete is video with the advent of streaming services such as Netflix. This has led to the Bankruptcy and disappearance of Blockbuster stores, and likely many other video stores as well.

As record stores, bookstores, and video stores disappear, they will leave behind a considerable amount of vacant retail space. The variety of retail on the streets will also diminish somewhat as a result of this.

What do you think will replace these stores? What do you think the overall effect might be? Significant, or relatively trivial? Can you foresee other kinds of retail stores that may potentially be on the "endangered list?" Can you imagine new uses for retail space that we may not have seen yet?

I am interested to know what people think.
 
Blockbuster and HMV have been bleeding for ever.

They have been talking about the death of book stores since the dawn of Amazon.com. I guess they will be the next to go, however, there still seems to be some degree of tangibility and emotion that comes with purchasing a book that e-books can't muster.

I don't see how Best Buy makes it. Zero margin, high competition, zero loyality and high overhead????

The next thing to go should be bank branches...who actually goes to a bank branch?? But, they are building them on every corner
 
Blockbuster and HMV have been bleeding for ever.

They have been talking about the death of book stores since the dawn of Amazon.com. I guess they will be the next to go, however, there still seems to be some degree of tangibility and emotion that comes with purchasing a book that e-books can't muster.

I don't see how Best Buy makes it. Zero margin, high competition, zero loyality and high overhead????

The next thing to go should be bank branches...who actually goes to a bank branch?? But, they are building them on every corner

I don't think bank branches are going anywhere. I mean, I never go to the bank because I do everything online. But some things you have to go to a bank for, like a certified cheque, or to get a mortgage. I don't see how those could be done online.
 
This is an interesting idea, but I guess my major comment would be that stores like Blockbuster and HMV aren't anchor stores in the way that Eaton's was for so many malls or how bank branches were the outlets of our nascent villages (Dupont and Christie, Davenport and Landsdowne). With smaller square footage imprints its easier to absorb the loss of an HMV or a blockbuster.

Even the demise of Chapters/Indigo would not have the major impact that Eaton's had on numerous malls across the country.

As for banks closing; banks confuse me, I remember numerous branch closings in the 90's and now banks are ramping up additional branches (an example - there was a RBC on Eglinton West of Ave Road, which closed in the nineties and then a RBC re-opened along that strip about a year or so ago). That being said - banks are no longer that anchor tenant, or legitimizing force, that our villages/BIA's require. Take Dupont and Spadina - which was once anchored by a CIBC at the corner. Its become a thriving little village in part because of neighbourhood demographics, and in part because of the strip being anchored by a LCBO and revitalized Shoppers Drug Mart.
 
The next thing to go should be bank branches...who actually goes to a bank branch?? But, they are building them on every corner

Ugh, a personal pet peeve.

I go in to see the teller only for three reasons: depositing a cheque and not having a hold placed on it, buying foreign currency, or withdrawing cash in denominations other than $20s. Yet every time I go in the line up is massive and full of people performing simple transactions they could do online and tellers who to talk your head off and spend 5 minutes doing what would normally take 5 seconds.

I have managed to move 80% of my banking to ING and am working on the rest. They just need to start offering credit cards.
 
The other thing that confuses me about all the bank branches is the fact that there is so little need to relocate your home branch. I have not lived in Guelph since 1993 yet its still my home branch. I have not set foot in there for almost 20 years as there has not been a need.
 
The other thing that confuses me about all the bank branches is the fact that there is so little need to relocate your home branch. I have not lived in Guelph since 1993 yet its still my home branch. I have not set foot in there for almost 20 years as there has not been a need.

I think the concept of a home branch is kinda outdated now. I don't think there's any meaning to the term these days anyway, is there? What can you do at a home branch you can't do at any other?
 
You are right, the concept of the "home branch" is irrelevant today. Wherever you opened your account, you might as well keep it that way, no matter where you may re-locate to.

One thing about branches today is that banks offer many more financial services now as far as lending and investments go. For this kind of business many people prefer to come in for a face to face appointment with a financial services manager. As far as everyday transactions go, like deposits and withdrawls, there is practically no need to go to the branch, although you may be surprised how many people still do it. As someone who works for a bank I am sometimes surprised at how many people still believe they need to go into the branch to do many things they could easily do on the phone, or on the Internet.

But anyway, back to my original post, there is one thing that sticks me about the disappearance of businesses like record, book, and video, stores. It's not so much the drop in retail volume but the drop in retail diversity on our streets. These businesses served as kind of a bridge between retail commerce and popular culture. You could say that they represented the cultural aspect of retail. Now that they are going, I think it is actually a significant loss. Of course they could be replaced by more shoe stores, or restaurants, or what have you, but it's kind of the street life ecosystem equivalent of a loss of biodiversity in a natural system. That's how it seems to me at the moment anyway.
 
I don't see the end of bank branches anytime soon. After ignoring retail banking throughout much of the 90s, Canadian banks have discovered how much money can be made at the retail level. I'm sure each branch will continue to handle fewer and fewer "regular" transactions every year, but the branches will still exist to sell mutual funds and other services - the panoply of financial services that Mississauga Slim referred to.

I also do not see book stores disappearing any time soon. Much like cinemas (whose demise has been predicted almost every decade starting in the 1950s), they will continue to exist, although they will need to adapt. Chains like Chapters/Indigo will continue to sell more and more non-book merchandise (finally becoming the "cultural department stores" that Heather Reisman always envisioned). Smaller book sellers will continue a move away from fiction bestsellers (the books that have proven easiest to transition to ebooks) towards books that a segment of the population still prefers to purchase in hard copy (cookbooks, children's books, etc.). I actually think small, independent book stores may do better than the chains (goodbye, Coles?) as they might be better placed to respond to local buying habits and have traditionally relied less on selling massive amounts of discounted bestsellers.

Video stores are doomed (except perhaps for the occasional quirky independent shop with a selection of hard-to-find titles - the type of place that might attract people from a wider area). The video store has only really been a presence on the retail landscape for 30 years or so - a mere blip. Changing technology gave birth to the video store, and ironically changing technology conspired to kill them.

My prediction for an endangered retail specie: the power centre. Rising fuel costs, rising land values and an aging population will together spell the demise of many of them. Since so many of them were built cheaply, with their obsolescence planned almost from Day One, it will be easy for landowners to replace them with more lucrative higher-density developments. Big stores will not cease to exist, but as chains like Wal-Mart and Home Depot become more accustomed to building urban format stores, they will become far more receptive to abandoning the "big box with a sea of parking in front" model.

In a perfect world, higher-density development that replaces power centres, whether it remains strictly commercial or becomes mixed-use, will offer more opportunities for more varied retail in both size and offerings, perhaps even with more interest to leasing to independents and local chains. In suburbia, at least, this could lead to more, not less, biodiversity (to respond to Mississauga Slim's concern).
 
I noticed HMV is setting up in the vacate video place on the lower level at Sq One as either their new home, which is haft or less than the current size or a 2nd outlet for various items. Should be open this weekend.
 
As record stores, bookstores, and video stores disappear, they will leave behind a considerable amount of vacant retail space. The variety of retail on the streets will also diminish somewhat as a result of this.

The land wont stay vacant for long, one of the other big box stores will take it over in a heart beat. I have read Bed Bath Beyond which is planning to expand has showed interest in taking over the larger Boarders anchor stores. Look at Sam's Club here in Ontario, most of those stores were turned into Lowes Hardware.
 
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I noticed HMV is setting up in the vacate video place on the lower level at Sq One as either their new home, which is haft or less than the current size or a 2nd outlet for various items. Should be open this weekend.

I can only see them downsizing, not expanding.
 
Bookstores won't be going away any time soon; novels and other small-sized books and periodicals can be put on an iPad or Kindle, but large-format books about art or photography or technical interests will never fit.
 
Indeed. Most of the books in my ever-expanding library are picture books, and I don't turn the pages in strict sequence. Sometimes I have two or three open around me at the same time, like some sort of nesting creature.
 

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