There has been talk about it for some time but a Winners store is indeed opening in the space between McNally Robinson and Red River Co-Op grocery store at the Grant Park Shopping Centre. A series of store closures and moves inside the mall and of ones facing out to Grant Avenue are signs of the logistical chess game in preparing the mall for another key anchor.
Modern Taco Company is closed now and Magiccuts has a sign inside the mall indicating where they will be moving to in the future. Once all the spaces out front are vacated, the interior walls will be removed to create the larger space. It is unknown whether this includes an expansion outward to the same line as McNally. Both Shopper Drug Mart and the former Target also pushed out northward to create space in past years.
It seems Grant Park has been under construction for years and in truth, it has been. Only now one of the last corridors is being modernized in the same design as the rest of the mall. Canadian Tire is now open in the spot that Target once occupied. However, they did not take the entire space in July leaving room for Goodlife Fitness to join them on the east side.
Goodlife Fitness will have to do some work on the space as there are literally no windows or entrances out front to the space. Nor is there a trailer out front yet selling memberships. Expect to that and work being done soon.
The addition of Winners will make Grant Park Shopping Centre a strange hybrid of big and small stores. Not wholly a big box mall or traditional mall, it keeps evolving and has has big money spent on it to achieve success. Contrast this with what has been happening at Garden City Shopping Centre which has seen a steady decline that borders on neglect.
There is no timetable on Winners but the opening seems likely in 2017.
This has been a guest editorial by John Dobbin.
To read more from John, visit his blog Observations, Reservations, Conversations
