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Bramalea City Centre

doady said:
Forget about transit and pedestrians. Even when people drive to mall, they can at least walk around from store to store after they have parked their car. People can't do that in a power centre. They almost always have to drive to each individual store in a power centre.

The death of malls has nothing to do with people disliking malls, or preference for urban retail. After all, power centres are the main competitor of malls, and power centres are way more anti-urban than malls. So if anything retail has become even more anti-urban the past 15 years.

The real reason malls are in decline is because of the death of department stores, i.e. the loss of anchor tenants of malls. Remember Eaton's? Malls are designed so that people walk in-between the department stores. With department stores or other anchor tenant, the mall has to be converted to a power centre (e.g. Meadowvale TC, South Common, etc.).
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There is much truth in what you say. Trinity Common is the closest power centre to me and when I do shop there (rarely really) I make it a point to park sorta centrally and walk around (returning to put stuff in the trunk if I have to).....the looks you get as a pedestrian in those places (particulalry cause the sidewalks are rare and sometimes just end) are crazy. If you ever wanted to see a place where "cars rule over people" it is the big box mall.

I kinda disagree with the notion that it was the death of department stores that killed malls......in reality the department store business is still relatively healthy in America and Quebec yet big box retail still thrives in those places. I think, simply, it is cost. The common area costs that a retailer pays in addition to their rent in an enclosed mall is staggering.....in a big box centre they can get far more floor space for far less cost....so their margin increases. The thing the malls have to do is show that their mall concept/location will drive much higher sales per s.f. to offset those extra costs.....in too many cases, this is just not true.
 
The trend amongst many mature, yet well-performing malls is increasing the gross leasable area, attracting "big box" retailers like Best Buy, Sport Chek, while providing a place for the larger, trendy fashion stores like H&M. Bramalea, Fairview, Square One have been busy adding parking decks to maximize their GLAs. Bramalea City Centre really does a good job here with the underground parking along with the new five-deck garage. The malls that continue to invest in themselves are doing fine and dandy; they fill the role that power centres never could.

I'm sure the Osmington development at Bovaird and Mississauga has legs. Georgetown is still expanding, yet has no decent shopping. Georgetown Marketplace technically serves a market area of over 50,000, yet has little to recommend it. Shoppers World isn't even trying, it seems to be a gigantic version of Meadowvale or South Common in the way it is seeking power-centre type retailers, even as the old AMC/Chrysler lands nearby are also competing for that market; and Heartland isn't that far.
 
The death of the mall is 100% due to the fact that we don't have suitable anchors to drive them. Mall growth continues (at least up till 2008) in the US as they have anchors in expansion mode and offered shopping experiences people actually liked (Nordstroms, Macy's, etc). In Europe, IKEA anchors a lot of malls.

The issue in Canada is the Bay and Sears are all on ancient "anchor deals" where they pay little rent, these deals in most cases are 20 or 30 years old. If they were not on such favorable rent terms they would most certainly go bankrupt as their productivity is so low. Its impossible for a mall developer to finance a new mall based on Sears and the Bay/Zellers, the economics are way out of whack, not to mention neither Sears or the Bay offer the shopping experience or draw they did in the past.

Anchors are basically meaningless in Canada. The new anchor is the mid-box (i.e. the new part of Yorkdale) or the cache tenants like Apple or Crate and Barrel.
 
airplane-dude said:
Ya know Adma, by your logic (that 'colored people' have ruined the GTA malls), Bramalea City Centre should be long dead.. Instead it's thriving and expanding..

While Sheridan Centre on the other hand (in an area with more "not colored" people) is instead on life support.

Care to explain why that may be?
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Bramalea benefited from being a "hub mall" conceived in the pre-80s era; therefore it had a head start in "adaptability". Sheridan Centre, though, was a more awkward creature: a less-than-hub-mall (less than even Woodbine) with self-conscious hub-mall pretensions. In a way, Sheridan's an inverse echo of Woodbine; rather than an overbuilt "white middle" mall in an area on the cusp of "ghetto", it's an overbuilt "white (upper) middle" mall serving a demo that, except for the senior mall-walker crowd, is pretty much extinct to malldom. Remember what's *really* happened to that old "white middle" mall-demo ideal...

stuff-white-ppl-like.jpg


They're not "into" malls anymore, per se.

And as far as "ruined" goes; I've already mentioned Jane-Finch, and add something like Dufferin Mall to the mix, too. I can't say they're "ruined" for being more ghetto/multikulti than they used to be; quite the contrary...
 
There will be a Pickle Barrel and Spring Rolls opening here, which will be very busy.

There is a lack of good restaurants in Brampton.
 
lordmandeep said:
There will be a Pickle Barrel and Spring Rolls opening here, which will be very busy.

There is a lack of good restaurants in Brampton.
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I agree they will do well......chains seem to do well in Brampton.....I don't see, however, how they alter the number of good restaurants in Brampton?
 
They will be inside the mall, likely with a ground entrance and with it being underground like at Yorkdale.


Brampton has a lot of chain restaurants but something like Pickle Barrel and Spring Rolls is something that is missing here.
 
Any ideas as to what stores are left to open? The Bramalea City Centre Twitter page asked whether shoppers wanted to see Aritzia and Proactiv Solutions open in the mall and I don't think they would just ask that without a strong belief that they had secured the two as a tenants already. There still seems to be a ton of space. A lot of European and French-Canadian brands seem to have taken up shop (Vero Moda, Jack & Jones, Joshua Perets, Point Zero) but not much else.
 
dshaikh said:
Any ideas as to what stores are left to open? The Bramalea City Centre Twitter page asked whether shoppers wanted to see Aritzia and Proactiv Solutions open in the mall and I don't think they would just ask that without a strong belief that they had secured the two as a tenants already. There still seems to be a ton of space. A lot of European and French-Canadian brands seem to have taken up shop (Vero Moda, Jack & Jones, Joshua Perets, Point Zero) but not much else.
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Vero Moda and Jack & Jones? Looks like Bramalea and Erin Mills are getting the same stores. Funny that Square One doesn't have either of those retailers.
 
Did some research and apparently Jack & Jones and Vero Moda are owned by the same company (Bestseller). So is ONLY, another one of the stores that opened at Bramalea. Seems like they're really interested in expanding but don't have the ability to get into the truly big malls as of yet.
 
Well I went to Bramalea today for the first time in a while..

It's good to see some more stores opening up, and the place looked very busy. BUT.. I did also notice a lot of boarded up or 'coming soon' stores. The new section alone had more than a dozen stores.. and there were probably about 6 or 7 through-out the rest of the mall.

Here's some (crappy Iphone pics)

Vera Moda (looks a lot bigger than the EMTC location)
bramalea1.jpg


Here's the JoeFresh.. Contractors were working on Saturday, so they must want it ready soon!
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The Forever21 is HUGE.. It's two levels...
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Here's inside.. still a long ways to go..
bramalea4.jpg


Didn't know they had a Bombay Co opening.. It's an outside only entrance though.
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I believe it's the same for SpringRolls.
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And here's the Pickle Barrel
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I suppose Forever21 will look like this (the opposite side) which is Urban Planet.
bramalea8.jpg
 
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