A few weeks ago, my neighbourhood Shell station closed down. That may seem a bit strange from the point of view that your local gas station probably closed long ago. Indeed, our Shell station was the last full service gas station in metropolitan Halifax, which has a population of over 350,000 people.
I was never much of a customer. Only in the most desperate circumstances was I willing to pay 3 cents extra per litre to have a chat about the weather and the finish on my SUV. Lots of my neighbours, though, valued the experience highly and not only paid extra for their gas but also to have the various whines and clunks coming from their vehicles checked out. The closure gave rise to a newspaper article to which several of these folks supplied nostalgic quotes concerning the passing of an era in which attendants wore uniforms and pulled out hankies to scrub bug splatter off the driver-side windshield.
It was a pretty big dent in neighbourhood retail complex for sure – about one-third of it up in smoke to be precise. We had a small seafood restaurant until a couple of years ago. Now we have a convenience store and a large yacht supplies store. Judging by its ever decreasing stock, the convenience store is next on – or should I say “off” – the block. It shares a building with the yacht store, which I suspect will move into its space as soon as the milk and girlie magazines are removed.
The convenience store is, interestingly, the victim of the same gas stations that killed our neighbourhood gas station: the massive ones that have 16 pumps and a convenience store overseen by a teenager or other minimum wage worker. According to the newspaper article these new operations pump at least three or four times more product than our former local station. In the lulls, they sell pop, snacks, lottery tickets, and all the other stuff that the convenience store handles at minimal extra cost to management. The convenience store is open from 6 or 7 am to midnight, seven days a week to provide us with near constant access to its vital products; however, the gas bars are open 24/7 for the same purpose. Frequently, these operations also include a small restaurant, albeit normally a franchised fast food operation. That was the business that left our ‘hood first.
The loss of a local business always gives rise to a tear but the truth is the restaurant simply moved to a more productive location in the “restaurant district” about a kilometer to the east on the way to downtown. The gas station was, of course, owned by one of the largest corporate entities in the world. The convenience store is owned by the Sobey’s organization, which is held by Nova Scotia’s most successful business family. When it closes, its tiny market share will probably be absorbed by an Irving station owned by the only family in Atlantic Canada that’s even richer.
As an urban planner, I hear a lot of lamentation about retailing. When the convenience store closes, there will be no place where we can cross paths with the neighbours. We will continue to have two yacht clubs, where I can meet with my neighbours who sail. That’s why we are going to have a yacht supplies store that will soon have 5,000 square feet, although you wonder if that’s for sure when they are doing half their business on the Internet. I think they will remain though, if only because there will always be a large group who buy their anti-fouling paint in May even though they should know that they will need it in October, and because winches burn out at the most inconvenient times and when they do most of us will pay any price to replace them rather than lose a week from our four-month sailing season (slight exaggeration).
As you may notice if you read the archive of this blog, I am more of an analyst than an interventionist, which I suppose is odd for a planner. I can’t see how any of this can be stopped. I’m also reluctant to see how much of it should be stopped. Gas stations, after all, are one of a small number of land uses specified by Jane Jacobs in the Life and Death of Great American Cities as unsuitable for incorporation in neighbourhoods.
There is now a huge hole in front of our old station where hydrogeologists are prospecting for environmental damage that I am sure Shell or, possibly, their insurers are praying is confined to their property. If the land gets a clean bill of health, the former station operator told the newspaper that he hopes to re-establish a service operation that will sustain a parking lot full of vehicles for another several years.
I can live with that if it happens. Our main street isn’t the type of Main Street that Jane Jacobs was thinking of anyway. She was writing of something like the Danforth in Toronto where people live in apartments above stores that front neighbourhoods laid out behind them. Residents of the apartments and the neighbourhoods in back walk along these streets dropping into pubs and restaurants and, if they want, buying furniture and other stuff that we get at the mall and, nowadays, the power centre.
Our street, by contrast, is a long and windy one going uphill and down on its way to a lovely former fishing village called Purcell’s Cove. At spots, it’s beautiful. You can see a couple of lakes at some points, the ocean at others. It goes through residential areas that range from modest to spectacular. There are two yacht clubs and a world class park. The commercial area is a little island at the beginning. We’ve had a bunch of retail and service operations come and go, including video stores (2), convenience stores (2), a dry cleaner/tailor, a pie store, and a tanning place that has grown into a salon/spa. These businesses fed off residents of a substantial hinterland of suburbs and fishing villages that was forced to pass by them on every trip to what was once “the city.”
In the long run I’m betting the yacht store and, maybe, the spa will be our retail complex. People say we need a café or pub in which to rally in the manner of turn of the last century Viennese intellectuals but on three occasions when the developers of the townhouse/apartment subdivision in which I live have sought approval for a strip mall opposite the existing yacht store/convenience store, residents have reacted like it was 1848. The developers being realists about the planning/political process and, probably, the future form of retail, have happily conceded the point in return for increased residential development that’s now on hold thanks to more neighbourhood resistance and, I suppose, the recession.
My point is that economic, environmental concerns, and “the people” are all driving our little retail complex to concentration. We are a specialized neighbourhood and it appears to me that we will ultimately support one specialized store, although there may be enough rich people in the big houses to support a bigger and better spa. Retailing has always been dynamic. In ancient times, small producers brought tiny collections of wares to markets that they attended until they sold out or gave up. Gradually, middle men were introduced and they added more and more lines. Customers could come and see everything they wanted just about any time they wanted it. Those who couldn’t make it could get a catalogue and order the products they wanted. The products would be delivered to the customer’s door by a wagon or a truck.
As more people moved closer to the store, though, catalogue circulation dropped off, everyone could drive to the mall and get what they wanted under a single roof. Eventually the mall got so big, however, that it seems like customers began to think that they might as well drive between the stores, especially if that allowed the stores to be bigger with still more stuff and lower prices to boot. Now, though, it looks like the catalogue is about to make a comeback in electronic form and, for the most part, completely separate from the store. If you want a soccer shirt from your favorite team in the Mexican league, you can have it in a week – home, away, or third jersey – delivered to your doorstep or, maybe, your superbox (don’t they make so much sense not only as a place to keep the mail dry and secure but also as a place to meet the neighbours?).
Where it will all go, is a not entirely predictable but also not entirely unpredictable. Several retail categories are obviously endangered. Some products that have become electronic rather than physical entities are already disappearing from streetfronts. CD stores are the leading example but I’ll be very surprised if videos don’t follow them into oblivion. I’m guessing book and magazine stores will follow for the same reason, given that the migration of their product lines to the Web has already played a part in the decimation of convenience stores. I’m also willing to guess that a variety of specialized products and services will go the same route. I expect the number of bank branches to continue to decline, for example.
Well-defined products like china or silverware are other obvious ecommerce targets. A few years ago I wanted to augment a small number of place servings of cutlery that I acquired on the occasion of my marriage in the early 1980s. I couldn’t find the pattern in town so I resorted to the Web. The original pattern had been spec’ed for the Wedding Register because it happened to be on sale at a substantial discount at the time of the blessed event; however, I found a warehouse in Kansas City offering eight place settings plus serving spoons, etc. for a price that would barely have bought two place settings from Birks 15 years before. I couldn’t believe it was the same thing until it arrived at my door three or four days later.
As much as I enjoyed the experience of going to a store and being served by a knowledgeable middle-aged woman who dressed better for her job than I ever have for mine, it can’t beat getting exactly what you want for 20 per cent of the price. Its just too good to deny and it suggests to me that the future of retail is a few very, very large stores selling the small number of things that we really need to see, feel, and put on before we buy, or that we want for immediate or next to immediate consumption. That’s food and liquor, clothes, hardware, and a few other things, including gasoline so long as we need it. Even in the remaining categories, don’t be surprised if the demand adapts to the mode of supply. There is a reason that fashion has shifted so strongly to logo wear and other branded products that have a guaranteed look that circumvents the need for direct inspection. Its particularly helpful if you are willing to wear your pants halfway down your ass to start with.
It may be as David Foot has suggested that our tolerance for cavernous warehouse stores with concrete floors will wane as we all get older and our knees giveout. That may encourage boutique operations to fill up inexpensive retail spaces abandoned by record stores, video outlets, convenience stores, and so on but it may just as likely lead to further migration to the Internet so as to avoid leaving the condo altogether. It could also lead to a revival of coffee shops (or, maybe, that’s continued proliferation) to provide the meeting places lost to the decline of the bazaar, altough there are lots of examples of the Internet serving that role beyond the prying eyes of nosy neighbours. Hard to say, I think.
What I do think is that we planners have got to re-think the glue that will hold communities together. Retail is important. I don’t think its going to disappear. I think it going to be more concentrated although and I can’t see its relevance increasing except possibly among the elderly — who will admittedly be increasing in number. If I’m betting, though, I’ve already said that I think this is a very modest antidote to the more pervasive tug of the Internet. For planners, I think this adds to the reasons that we have cultivated for a century that allow communities to locate anywhere and land uses to separate from each other.
The question that follows is how much to fight it. Many planners seem to start from the perspective that the market is in a constant state of failure. I don’t think so myself. I’ve always seen retail as a better mechanism for tying together a community than parks and community centres, precisely because the usefulness of stores is confirmed by the willingness of consumers to pay full price (as opposed to acquiesing to a government paying it for them). While we could have a lengthy discussion about the role of roadways and other public infrastructure in supporting retail districts, people go to them and reach into their pockets to consume voluntarily.
Good Commercial Districts and Good Parks are Good Neighbours
It has always been my feeling that the best urban areas combine good commercial opportunities with quality public amenities but the challenge of creating these places will grow as commercial networks move into cyberspace. Its not likely that planners with only modest influence that is generally confined to the local level will be able to steer this global trend. With much less of this secret ingredient to go into the plans for public places, planners are going to have to search for new recipes for cohesive communities.
