Before Malls
Before Malls
Most suburban areas in Canada are dotted with malls and shopping centers. Yet, as ubiquitous as malls are, they’ve only been around for less than 56 years!
The first two malls in Canada were built in 1952. First came the Park Royal Mall in West Vancouver followed a few months later by Toronto’s Sunnybrook Mall.
So how did people survived before malls? They simply went to their neighbourhood General Store.
Today, general stores are only found in remote rural communities, but they dominated shopping before malls for over 150 hundred years. They provided everything a community needed from food to clothing and from household products to farming equipment. Products hang from wall to wall and even from the ceiling because they had to have everything the community needed.
But more importantly, general stores brought not just traffic but life into a community. Communities mushroomed around them with taverns, hotels, and tollgates. And as these communities grew into villages and later into towns, the stores became the economic lifeline where people often traded using barter or credit.
Also, the general store owner was the next person to turn to for a loan when bank turned people down. In a hilarious way, the general store owners also introduced the concept of the “repo-man”. It was not unusual for storekeepers sneak inside a farm late at night to steal the livestock from farmers who did not pay.
Some general stores were cash cows. Anyone with a general store within the vicinity of the Klondike struck gold without ever setting foot near a river. The real gold in any gold rush was not in the river or in the ground but in the sale of supplies to miners.
Surprisingly, in Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, there are at least two general stores that have survived the never-ending onslaught of urban development.
One of them is the Dempsey Store in the north part of Toronto. It remained in operation until 1989 when it moved a few kilometers away from the busy intersection of Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue. It was restored and turned into a general store museum.
Another store that has survived is the Newtonbrook General Store. It was built in 1907, but it didn’t have the glorious retirement of the Dempsey store. Today, it’s still in operation as a donut shop.
When the Royal Park and Sunnybrook Malls opened, they ushered a new era in shopping. General stores were geared toward the needs of farming communities. The mall, on the other hand, was better suited for urban living. Within a decade since the end of the Second World War, general stores disappeared from Canada’s landscape and shopping malls took over.
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