When our shopping moves online, what takes the place of our favourite brick-and-mortar stores?

 Following on my griping about the Shoppersization of Canadian downtowns, this Economist article reminded me of the broader trends that have helped boost Shoppers’ ubiquity. We don’t really go downtown to buy things anymore.  

It’s not just that we’re buying more stuff online. It’s that many of those things that are best suited for online shopping—music, collectibles, books and periodicals—have also provided the best “third spaces” where enthusiasts can loiter and bump into other like-minded people—the reasons why people have loved shopping downtown. Bookstores, music stores, collectible boutiques and magazine stands are places where browsing without purpose can be a form of identity expression. Their disappearance (into the digital economy) is changing the character of our commercial streets, especially as more mission-driven shopping (hardware, household goods—stuff that can't be “dematerialized”) moves online and to big box outlets beyond our downtowns.

But wait—our downtown streets seem to be as lively as ever before. I think that’s because the rise of restaurant culture and burgeoning neighbourhood bar scenes have filled in the gap.

Storefronts where retailers used to sell "things" are now occupied by businesses offering experiences. The customers who produce “the scene” are as much the product as the food or beverages. Deprived of being able to loiter in the Heavy Metal section of a local music shop, we find a restaurant or bar that, through other means, puts us in close proximity with our demographic. We eat or drink together, rather than shop together.

Perhaps we’re looking at a world where there is little downtown retail other than convenience and food shopping. Thus the rise of Shoppers as a place to buy things you won’t travel any distance for (toilet paper, shampoo) or can’t wait to be delivered (drugs, a soft drink on a hot day).

What will keep our downtowns fun is discovering the next hot food trend, not hanging around in Sam the Record Man all day. It's a tastier pastime  but, compared to the browsing the CD bins, a pricier one.

Why the Loblaw takeover of Shoppers won't make downtown life any better--and will probably make it duller

The hegemony of Shoppers Drug Mart in downtown life took a sharp left turn this week with the announcement that Loblaw intends to buy the pharmacy chain for $12.4 million. 

While optimists are hoping for savings though cost-cutting and perhaps loyalty reward synergies between the PC Plus and Optimum programs, the merger will likely speed up the Shoppersization of urban life—big generic chain stores gobbling up prime commercial space, squeezing out the variety and whimsy that makes city life great.

Throughout Toronto’s condo boom, it’s been clear that Shoppers Drug Mart is one of the top choices for anchor tenants in new buildings. (Winners or Marshalls might also do in a pinch.) Of course, why not? A pharmacy is a safer, quieter and less risky choice for storefront space than, say, a nightclub, independent café or niche boutique. But safe choices in retail tenants makes for bland and banal streetscapes. A 25-minute streetcar ride down Queen West from Roncesvalles to University—Canada’s most vibrant shopping street—showcases no fewer than four Shoppers Drug Marts.

Grocery stores aren’t particularly exciting either, but they’re usually in oddball parking-lotted places or, in the case of the two new flagship Loblaw—Maple Leaf Gardens and Queen West at Portland—imaginatively tucked away into larger developments. Target—again, not a retailer known for its beautiful properties but let’s do our best to muster some choices here—has so far only opened stores on the fringes of the city. The chain remains virtually invisible to downtowners. You can complain that Walmart hurts small independent shops, but you can’t complain the stores are eyesores. So far, the retail giant’s only central location is in a mall, though plans to open a new location near Kensington Market are enough to send a chill up the spine of any flaneur.

Shoppers Drug Marts are much more in your face. Small enough to eat up the best most high-traffic locations, big enough to squeeze out three or four small boutiques once they set their sights on a property. Shoppers drug Marts can make even the most unique neighbourhood feel like nowhere at all.

Surprisingly, Pharma Plus and Guardian drugs have done little to take advantage of all the new retail space that’s come available in central Toronto; the expansion of the Pharma Plus at Church and Wellesley seems almost uniquely futile. Which means that the city is not merely awash in new brightly lit pharmacies, but awash in a single pharmacy brand.

A Loblaw/Shoppers merger can only increase the homogenization of our urban landscape. Unless other major retail chains push into downtown—or unless landlords start making it easier for independent stores to get leases—our corridors will be awash in red and white façades, retail spaces that offer a little of everything except personality.

Bright young thing

I have also been doing work lately for Yonge Street Media, a weekly online magazine that spotlights innovation and creativity in Toronto. Having focussed so much on theatre lately, I often feel like I'm applying arts-style coverage to business and community-building projects, which is kinda fun.

Broke planet

When This American Life, broadcast on NPR in the U.S. but I listen to it via podcast, announced its series on the global financial crisis, I was a little skeptical. The show's quirky existentialism seemed better suited to stories about a guy who couldn't commit to buying a sofa or a mother who had lied to her daughter about being swapped with another child at birth. They shouldn't be doing... business stories.

Boy, was I wrong. Their coverage of what went bang on Wall Street has been fascinating and devastating. This week's edition (you can listen to online or download it free for a week, then it goes pay), The Watchmen, had me swearing aloud while I listened at the gym. What other show would call financial regulators all over the world looking for the one that was responsible for the AIG collapse?

Recessionary measures

As I was heading to the Dufferin Mall the other day, I thought to myself, "From now on, always see if you can pick something up at Dollarama, if possible, before checking out pricier options." I arrived at Dollarama to find they now had items for $1.25, $1.50 and, gasp, $2. Just when Ontario's lead dollar store should be coming to our rescue, it's sold us down the river.

There are two kinds of economists in the world

Having loved Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, I had an "if you like this, you'll like this" feeling when I saw Steven E. Landsburg's More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics in a remainder bin. Three chapters in, it's as irritating a book of nonfiction as I've ever read, a reminder that economics, while it finds itself sticking its nose into all sorts of human affairs, is a rough tool.

The title essay is particularly vexing because the thesis is so endearing: If more people had sex, the spread of AIDS would be reduced. But of course, by "more people" he means one of two kinds of people: sexually conservative ones. If sexually conservative people increased their quantity of sexual partners, there would be more competition for partners and promiscuous people would have less sex. (More pure water in the stream dilutes the polluted.) He even gives these types names: shy Martin and sluttish Maxwell.

If only the two were so easy to tell apart! At what point does a sexually conservative person become a promiscuous one? Three partners a year? 50? What about people who are serially monogamous or go in and out of periods of promiscuity? What about luck--yes, promiscuous people are statistically more likely to become infected with a sexually transmitted disease, but, as individuals, they get infected by carriers. Carriers are impossible to detect unless everyone is regular tested, honest and upfront about their status.

Lansburg falls into the labelling trap: All his arguments rest on the accuracy of his labels and when you're talking about pure/impure, only a small percentage of the population fits cleanly into one label or the other. There's counter intuitive thinking and there's pretending that people are so easily categorized.

The "Be Fruitful And Multiply" chapter, which advocates that more people are better for the planet because it means more geniuses is equally troublesome. First, it presumes that geniuses are born, not made--a larger population living at greater disadvantage is going to produce fewer geniuses than a small one where people are presented with greater opportunities for learning and achievements. He also suggests that more people gives us more opportunity to choose a suitable partner, overlooking the problem of distribution and the crippling effect of too much choice.

UPDATE: This book continues to drive me crazy. With his jaunty tone and can-do attitude, Lansburg is a master at defining problems and forces as narrowly as he has to to be counterintuitive. Judges forbid juries to gather extra-trial information for fear they'll lose their jobs? Pul-leez. This ridiculous claims in this book are a testament to the small part rational thought plays in our behavioural patterns.