Today’s Era-Banner reports that U.S. big box home improvement store, Lowes, is opening one of it’s first stores in the GTA this year just north of Newmarket, near Green Lane and Yonge St.
Woo Hoo! Great! Excellent! Just what we need.
Let’s just consider this situation for a sec.
- the U.S. housing bubble is bursting (has burst?)
- fewer and fewer Americans are doing home renovations
- banks are being left with homes that people are walking away from since they owe more than the equity the have in them
- the U.S. home improvement / consumer products industries are laying people off to preserve their eroding profits
- Canadian businesses which depend on an American market (ie Ontario manufacturing) are starting to feel the double crunch of a downturn in the American economy and a rising Canadian dollar
- and the issues of global climate change and peak oil are telling us, loud and clear, that we should rethink our retail model so that people can find what they need closer to home without having to drive their car, and that we should be rearranging how we live so that we live, work and shop closer together.
So a new big-box, big-parking-lot, not-serviced-by-transit, paved-over-farmland copy of the old business model seems to be exactly what we need. Perfect.
