The numbers are out, and they are indicating a slow rise of online sales versus retail sales. According to Colliers International, online sales have put a large enough hole in retail sales to cumulatively stock a group of shopping centres that include the main malls in Vancouver, Halifax, Ottawa and Victoria combined.
Purchases, through what Colliers referred to as, the omni-channel (any purchases not made in a store) are growing at three times the rate of traditional retail sales.
Although the study uses those big-city malls as examples to illustrate how much competition traditional retail faces, I don’t see a great deal of evidence of this decline in bigger cities or smaller centres the sized of Estevan. The first place I’ve noticed malls ever so slightly starting to become a little more desolate is in the really small towns.
In the town I grew up in, Antigonish Nova Scotia, I watched as a teenager, as all the interesting shops in the local mall—a music store among them—began to disappear, closing up over the years, eventually being replaced.
Eventually, when each store packed up and left, it took a little longer for another to replace it. The last I checked, the mall in Antigonish is only partially occupied, like many others, from the half-empty Elgin Mall in St. Thomas, Ontario, to the many assorted ones I visited in various small towns in Alberta.
The Colliers International study wasn’t all gloom and doom. In Canada, malls in major market areas where large brands (many of them purveyors of clothing) are present, have seen a rise in sales of 4.8 per cent, since last year. So my observations about bigger city malls weren’t totally off. With the holiday season coming there will be a surge in retail store sales in December, clearly with the holiday season giving a much needed boost. This boost is anticipated across the country, to varying degrees, in every mall from the Mic Mac Mall to the Estevan Shoppers Mall.
Although online shopping is convenient, there is one area in which it will have trouble supplanting the kind of traditional retail shopping that you have to get out of your living room and drive to the store to do—and that’s shopping for clothes.
For me, shopping for clothes has always been something that can be summed up in Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates-analogy about life; it’s a very mixed experience, I’ll say. Some of the things I’ve bought online have fit like they were made just for me and become welcome fixtures in my wardrobe. Others have been falsely advertised, and don’t fit.
When you don’t have the opportunity to try some of those things on, feel the texture of the fabric, and have that important tactile information available to you to truly get a grip on what kind of garments you’re dealing with, there’s no telling what you’ll end up with. In my experience the most reliable and convenient way to find anything that I can comfortably wear is to look for it close to home.
Another wrinkle (pun very much intended) in the practice of buying clothes online for me has been my body type. Size medium can be a very arbitrary term, dependant on which continent you order it from.
There are very few shirts that comfortably fit my torso. I get most of my middling height from a lopsidedly long torso. This leads to a lot of medium shirts fitting poorly, riding up closer to my lower ribs than my hips, when I lift my arms. Large shirts, mostly long enough to cover my monkey-like trunk, end up fitting like a snug tent.
As the Christmas season approaches, and Christmas shopping looms on the horizon, I ponder my choices. I tend to avoid buying clothes for family and friends back home only I see in person about once a year, yet the convenience of placing a quick order online has its charm.
It’s safe to say that malls, particularly busy downtown ones like Regina’s Cornwall Centre or Edmontons’ City Centre Mall aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And along with those popular big centres, there are always the assorted small businesses downtown and outside of malls, that can cater to those needs It’s comforting to know that if I can’t find what I’m looking for online, there are still plenty of options in the real world.
