It seemed to be a can’t lose location but River City Sports off Kenaston in Seasons of Tuxedo has been closed by the landlord. By some media accounts, they were not paying their rent and had been struggling for months.
The Kenaston location had been selected as the flagship location after the original Henderson Highway location was shut down.
River City Sports becomes the first retailer to fail at Seasons. Tucked in between IKEA and Cabela’s, it seemed the location should have been perfect. This was not to be.
The additional retailers to be added in 2014 to the site definitely slowed and the focus turned to apartments of the south side of Sterling Lyon Parkway. The long awaited Lowe’s is still not built. A continuation of planned retailing seems to have stalled.
So why the failure? In short, there has been a lot of retail built this past year. They 20 plus stores added to Polo Park and other stores built along Kenaston have spread out where new retailers are locating. River City Sports would never see others join it in the area and drive sales.
This could be a lesson for some retailers. The boom we have seen in retailers being added these last years could be mitigated by a saturation of the market and a slowing of the economy.
The focus of a lot of developers now is to ensure that housing goes up near their retail center and to this end, we see a lot of apartments and condos going up around Sterling Lyon.
The collapse of oil prices and the markets could signal a new recession. Is this one of the first signs for Winnipeg?
This has been a guest editorial by John Dobbin.
To read more from John, visit his blog Observations, Reservations, Conversations
