Joined: Feb 2009
Posts: 2688
Something is Off
1/12/2016 at 10:46 AM
I am not sure what is going on to scare new retail and business away, but something is, and I do not think it is just an arbitrary number that they have before they will look at development in an area. (ie Red Loster will not consider a market that is under 500,000 people, etc)
Costco has gone so far as to have a job fair (amongst their own employees first) to hire for our location. What I do know for sure is they did have the brakes on them moving to Brandon because there are "like size" communities in North America that have Costcos that are not doing well and apparently they were doing more studies. I am not sure which markets they are comparing to ours, but if you look at place like Fargo ND with a city population of 116,000 people, and Okotoks, AB with a city population of 24,000 people (and a VERY busy Costco), Brandon should be a no brainer. According to the 2011 census the trading area Brandon serves is over 180,000 - that is well below what it is estimated at today as the Chamber last said it is closer to 260,000. Not to mention how freaking busy the Winnipeg store always are - they have three stores for approx 750,000 residents and they are insanely busy all the time.
Then you look at Old Navy. They had - two Christmases ago - the management staff for the Brandon location hired and in training. That store was set to go, though my friend who worked in upper management would not tell me where at the time (she has since left them so I lost my link to info). Something happened to make that fall through too - when they already had staff hired and they pulled the plug??
It could have been the whole Sobeys/Safeway/Target debacle that all happened within a year of each other - perhaps ON decided to wait it out for better real estate knowing all that was coming down the line.
Something is happening to make these companies think twice about Brandon. I am very curious to know what the issue is. Is our local government placing ridiculous demands on these companies? Are they doing something to make it unattractive to build in Brandon? Could they seriously be scared at the prospect of building in a city that has a multi million dollar retail division built in a flood plain that was closed for 6 weeks in 2011? I can't see that, but some people from Winnipeg had the idea that Brandon completely shut down during that flood. There really are some misconceptions.
Is the old boys club mentality (which is still very prevalent here) scaring them off? When the majority of strip malls and developments are owned by select few people, is that unattractive to prospective businesses?
Is it the consumers themselves? Are they seeing that people flock to Walmart and Dollarama enough to make companies think we are too cheap in this area to bother with higher end offerings? (Not a fair comparison because there IS NO ALTERNATIVE to the bloody place, unless we go to Winnipeg....) Not to mention everything is made overseas now anyway.
I read a study a short time ago about incomes and money distribution in various areas of Canada. Yes, Western Manitoba has a lot of lower income families, but there is a strange proportion of families out here that have a lot of cash too. Sure the richest people in Canada may be in the big centres like TO and Vancouver, but there is a lot of money in our neck of the woods to be tapped. Maybe it is our proximity to Winnipeg and the US that scares them off - if people are willing to negate their time to drive to the US or Wpg to buy everything, why would anyone bother to set up shop here? And now with online shopping growing, who knows.
I am sure some of these companies have teams of researchers spending huge amounts of time and money to research these moves, but I am quite interested to see why our area is not more enticing.