Northern Light said:
From my understanding, Sak's Queen got off to a rough start, but ultimately performed pretty well, pre-Covid.
But obviously the extended lockdown, and low traffic levels downtown have hurt results there again.

That said, I completely agree that converting the Bloor store to Sak's was the way to go.

Instead, they not only let the Bloor store rot, they diminished one of the top performing Bay stores in Queen Street.
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You're definitely on the money with Saks, they started off real bad and the store's performance improved to a point where it was making some pretty slight positive margins (but not to the point of bragging about it). Of course now they're back to losses which makes sense with the current situation.

Make no mistake they would've been making a lot more had they located the store at Yonge and Bloor.

But you pretty much summarized it: they let the Bloor Bay store rot to the point of no return, while screwing up the Queen St. Bay location. Then compounding it by leaving money on the table by locating the Saks where they did.
 
The shopping in Toronto is not cohesive. It’s kind of choppy. Like you guys said , we have the Eaton center then we have bloor then we have yorkdale. Chicago is all centered around downtown. It is more centralized and everyone knows where to go to shop and they can find everything in one place. This city is not big enough like nyc London or Paris where you can afford numerous shopping districts.
 
vatche said:
The shopping in Toronto is not cohesive. It’s kind of choppy. Like you guys said , we have the Eaton center then we have bloor then we have yorkdale. Chicago is all centered around downtown. It is more centralized and everyone knows where to go to shop and they can find everything in one place. This city is not big enough like nyc London or Paris where you can afford numerous shopping districts.
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Toronto proper is 6x larger in area than Paris proper, and while dwarfed by NYC's metro area, Toronto's metro area is on par with London's. It's hard to make a fair comparison when our population is spread out like it is.

Chicago downtown isn't also the only shopping district; Wicker Park and Lincoln Park are considered major areas. As well, the largest malls aren't even in Chicago proper, they're in Schaumberg (Woodfield Mall) and Oak Brook (Oakbrook Center).
 
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We really need start thinking of this place in terms of Greater Toronto - Hamilton. It's all being stitched together/intensified and has formed one continuous swath of 'city' for a long time now. There are 8 million people (more than Hong Kong) from Oshawa through Toronto and on to Hamilton. That's not that far off from Chicago MSA at 9.4 million and if growth rates resume to pre-COVID levels we'll be larger by the time the decade is out. London is best described as a metro of 11-14 million depending on what one includes. It's still significantly larger than Greater Toronto - Hamilton but it's not the huge gulf it used to be.

Canadians are famously self-deprecating and many have outdated views on the relative size of Toronto. We do ourselves, and Canada, a disservice when we under sell ourselves to the extent that we do. We should start viewing 'Toronto' as a big global city because that's what it's become. And yes, Toronto is definitely large enough to have multiple shopping districts.

Metropolitan statistical area - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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vatche said:
The shopping in Toronto is not cohesive. It’s kind of choppy. Like you guys said , we have the Dufferin Mall, Eaton center then we have bloor then we have yorkdale. Chicago is all centered around downtown. It is more centralized and everyone knows where to go to shop and they can find everything in one place. This city is not big enough like nyc London or Paris where you can afford numerous shopping districts.
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FYP, since you missed the most important of them all.
 
With all due respect of course, but whenever Toronto is dubbed a world class city:

9Cfrqoq.png
 
isaidso said:
We really need start thinking of this place in terms of Greater Toronto - Hamilton. It's all being stitched together/intensified and has formed one continuous swath of 'city' for a long time now. There are 8 million people (more than Hong Kong) from Oshawa through Toronto and on to Hamilton. That's not that far off from Chicago MSA at 9.4 million and if growth rates resume to pre-COVID levels we'll be larger by the time the decade is out. London is best described as a metro of 11-14 million depending on what one includes. It's still significantly larger than Greater Toronto - Hamilton but it's not the huge gulf it used to be.

Canadians are famously self-deprecating and many have outdated views on the relative size of Toronto. We do ourselves, and Canada, a disservice when we under sell ourselves to the extent that we do. We should start viewing 'Toronto' as a big global city because that's what it's become. And yes, Toronto is definitely large enough to have multiple shopping districts.

Metropolitan statistical area - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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To your point, in 2019 Chicago's combined statistical area had an area of 28, 120 km2 and a population of 9,458,539 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_metropolitan_area). By comparison, in 2016 the Greater Golden Horseshoe had an area of 31,562 km2 and a population of 9,245,538 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Horseshoe). Given the historical growth rates of both cities, the Golden Horseshoe has no doubt surpassed the Chicago CSA in population by now. It can be difficult to fairly compare the populations of metropolitan areas in different countries, but as a general rule, I have found that Canadian census metropolitan areas as defined by Statscan have comparatively constrained boundaries.
 
Undead said:
With all due respect of course, but whenever Toronto is dubbed a world class city:

View attachment 340820
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Maybe I missed it; where did someone use that turn-of-phrase above?

****

I agree said phrase can be over-used and frankly a tad meaningless; at the same time Toronto is a very large city and is, more or less in the conversation with the most important/influential cities in the world.

If 'world-class' is over-done (and it is); so is needless self-deprecation.
 
Northern Light said:
Maybe I missed it; where did someone use that turn-of-phrase above?

****

I agree said phrase can be over-used and frankly a tad meaningless; at the same time Toronto is a very large city and is, more or less in the conversation with the most important/influential cities in the world.

If 'world-class' is over-done (and it is); so is needless self-deprecation.
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isaidso said:
We should start viewing 'Toronto' as a big global city because that's what it's become
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Tomayto, tomahto.

I think Canada is fantastic at many things. But we're doing our best to dilute those virtues. I also think this city and really, the entire country, is massively blinkered/ignorant in several key ways that forever relegate it to "also ran" status in my book. I could go on at length why I believe this to be the case, but I'm probably on a short leash with the mods when it comes to dragging threads off topic 😂
 
Perhaps if we stopped voting in politicians (and their brothers) who keep beating it over the constituents heads that "Toronto/Ontario/Canada will never be world class until we..."

And UT forum members stop with the supertall fetish and the fact that we don't have 6 Gehrys, 10 Fosters, etc...
 
zang said:
Perhaps if we stopped voting in politicians (and their brothers) who keep beating it over the constituents heads that "Toronto/Ontario/Canada will never be world class until we..."

And UT forum members stop with the supertall fetish and the fact that we don't have 6 Gehrys, 10 Fosters, etc...
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If London can turn a power plant into the Tate Modern, we can turn the Hearn into something half decent.
 
And all of that ends now. Take the insecurity-baiting stuff to General Discussion Forum threads please.

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