Originally Posted by Tenspot
Fear mongering on the news. Banks use superior security and if something does happen to go wrong via online banking, you are 100% reimbursed.
I'm thinking back to a certain bank that left an overnight courier vehicle with precious banking information inside, that got broken into.
Contrary to what you see in the news, on-line banking is perfectly safe.
http://www.vireviews.com
The Easter Bunny will soon be here.
Everything looks good and seems good now, but the intent is to put in a 4,000 sq. ft. private liquor store. With 7-Eleven, and the low income housing around the mall, it will return to be a place where persons would not want to be. It would be nice to have a family restaurant, and a variety store, and even a staples type of store, to accommodate, university students, and schools. Harewood residents should oppose the zone change application being pushed forward to allow a liquor outlet in the area.
Last edited by oldtimer; 06-18-2009 at 02:26 PM. Reason: forgot some words
I agree oldtimer - there is a liquor store a few blocks away. I think the 7-eleven looks shabby now - needs a face lift for sure, as does Quality Foods. A family restaurant would be great in there. What about a hair salon or a book store.
Liquor store is a go in University Village.
Sounds like the liquor store is going ahead unfortunately. I don't think we need a second one there when there is one a few blocks away.
Still some empty space, so It would be nice to see a restaurant or some funky shops go in.
Garland Coulson, http://GarlandCoulson.com
The liquor store will draw more people into the mall, which will result in other businesses wanting to setup shop there. Until the mall has higher traffic and more money spent per person, it will not get a quality family restaurant or larger store like Staples. Those businesses will only move in once there is a track record of successful stores with high volume.
We can't start turning businesses down because we'd rather have something else, that is a recipe for disaster and/or bankrupt businesses. We also can't oppose having certain types of stores (liquor, etc) from areas with low income housing as that would be discriminatory and basically telling the low income individuals that we don't trust their own judgment and we will place companies around you that we deem to be less hazardous. That area has a mix of housing and there are some well off people living close, should they be deprived of convenience? Seems very big-brother like to me.
I don't think the liquor store will cause any more problems than there already are in the neighborhood...They've got to get rid of the bingo place....all the losers out front are hurting the Quality Food's business...
I have said it before, I have always thought the Bingo Hall should go elsewhere. It is a gambling establishment and shoud have it's own property other than be located at a shopping mall. I would not call the bingo ppl losers but during the breaks at bingo, alot of ppl come outside the entrance to have a smoke which is very close to the entrance to Quality Foods. Not a pretty sight or smell for those wanting to enter the entrance to Quality Foods to shop.
I do not believe the Bingo Hall enhances added business for other shops in the mall. Alot of parking for this mall is taken up by the Bingo Hall players and parking for Quality Foods is not always the greatest for their shoppers because of this. The Bingo Hall on a busy session can have over 200 ppl there. Does not leave much for regular customers when it comes to parking close by. This mall does not have a large parking area.
On the other hand, the bingo hall provides pretty hefty revenue to the company that owns the mall, I'd imagine. If the rent that the bingo hall and Quality Foods pays is partly based on their sales dollars, it's possible that the bingo hall is making more money than QF and pays more rent. Same thing, perhaps, with the comparative square footage of the two areas.
If the bingo hall were to move to another location, it's possible that a lot of the people who work there wouldn't find it easy to get themselves to work at the new location. A lot of those people are women who are in one-car families with the male partner using the car to get to and from work, which leaves the bus service, which isn't necessarily convenient, with the way some of the routes and times are arranged. At least in the past, a lot of them lived close enough that they could walk to work. I have an ex-sister-in-law and other friends who've worked there, and it could have been difficult for them to travel to another, possibly distant, location. So that would put those people out of work, and sometimes the extra money that the bingo-working partner earns at a part-time job makes all the difference in the family income. It takes them off the financial edge and makes them a little more comfortable dollar-wise. When my sister-in-law worked there it paid for things like the rental of band instruments for the kids; it paid for skating for them, including bus fares and skate rental, at Frank Crane Arena; it paid for year books at Barsby; it paid course fees at Barsby; it helped to provide money for the kids to go on a band trip to Hawaii. With Mom picking up some of those costs, Mom and Dad were mortgage-free by thirty-seven, on one full time job and one part-time low-wage job and two kids whose Mom stayed at home until the younger one was in about Grade 4. They wanted that, they worked for it, they went without things for themselves to do it, and they did it. For others, the money they earned helped out when the family ran out money before they ran out of month.
Some of the workers might find it difficult to find another job in this economy. My sister-in-law, for example, got to about mid-Grade 11 before she had to quit school and find a minimum wage job to help out at home. So she'd never had any post-secondary training that would get her any kind of other job. It's possible that there are people working at the bingo hall now whose lives have been like that, too. So the family goes back to teetering on the financial edge, and stores suffer because things that might have been bought for kids aren't bought. If a store's sales drop, someone else may lose a job, because the store doesn't need as many sales people or check-out workers.
But any time any business in this town closes down or relocates, there are a lot of economic ripple effects that sometimes aren't considered.
Something that the Nanaimo transit system sometimes doesn't consider: a year or so ago, there was a change in bus scheduling, and several workers at the Woodgrove SaveOn had no convenient way to get to work, because the changed bus schedule, which had worked fine in the past, delivered them from the south end of town to work in the north end ten minutes late for their shift. Several of them talked to me about it. And I'd imagine that might have happened to people who worked retail in the mall itself.
The City bylaws require that no one smokes within three metres of a door, an open window, or an air intake for a building. Some malls have extended that distance. At Woodgrove, for example, the distance is ten metres. There's the possibility that people are inhaling as many harmful substances simply by walking from a distant parking space into University Place as they're inhaling if they walk within, say, four metres of a smoker. I'm calling it a "possibility" because I don't have current statistics on that. I know for sure that getting stuck in a traffic jam, especially in the summer, with car motors running around you, gives you a pretty bad dose of inhaled crud. In the summer heat, the asphalt itself off-gasses toxic material into the air.
"Not a pretty sight or smell for those wanting to enter the entrance to Quality Foods to shop." If people are smoking within three metres of the entrance to QF, complain to the store manager. QF bends over backwards in customer service, and I'm pretty sure that they'd call City Hall and have a bylaw enforcement officer up there. Not necessarily good for their corporate image, necessarily, if people discover that it was QF that called out a bylaw enforcement officer, but they'd do it, I believe. Same thing with the parking. Ask to see the manager and tell him about the parking problems the presence of the bingo hall is causing you.
Go into the bingo hall and explain the situation to its manager, too. If the majority of the smokers who are breaking a city bylaw are bingo players, then perhaps it would be better to start there than to start with QF. They might be willing to call the City to have a bylaw enforcement officer come up, too. I don't know anything about the what goes on at the bingo hall these days, but a bylaw is a bylaw, and they're in the city, too, right along with QF. I have absolutely no idea who owns the bingo hall, so I can't give you the pointers that follow.
Google "Quality Foods Qualicum" to find their site. They don't give their e-mail address, but at the left of the page there's a "Contact Us" option that gives you a blank e-mail page to fill in. Or try www.qualityfoods.com/root/Home.aspx. That's the page that gives you the "Contact Us" option. I know for sure that they respond very quickly to e-mails. Take the material you've posted here, and tell them the same thing.
But any time any business in this town closes down or relocates, there are a lot of economic ripple effects that sometimes aren't considered.
I wonder about the "sight" 'tho. There are a lot of sights I see around Nanaimo that displease me. Drunks and druggies reeling in the streets and shooting up in the downtown core. The things that go on in the night club area after the clubs close--perhaps that's been controlled in the year or so since I saw that. I hope so. Hookers performing sexual acts on their johns in the lane behind the house of a friend of mine. I don't like "muffin tops" and "camel toes", either. The "drift racers" at, I believe, the Woodgrove parking lot in the middle of the night.
I don't enjoy going to social events, many of them in support of Nanaimo charities, where I watch the sight of people getting stupider and stupider as the night goes on. Not that they're necessarily drinking to excess, but to someone who's never been a drinker, I can see the change in behaviour. Are many people normally so uptight that they have to have a couple of drinks to relax? I just sit there or circulate, with my ginger ale in a glass and without making comments about the drinkers. Ginger ale looks like it might be a "drink." It's amazing the number of people who drink who will push you to "just have one." The only response I've ever heard that works is "I'm a recovering alcoholic." I'm not, so I don't use it.
I've watched the demonization of smoking to the point that among a lot of teens it's become the "cool" and rebellious thing to do, (and teens always have, and always will, find a way to be rebellious) in much the same way that drinking beer at bush parties and then puking their guts out is "cool." Not to say that I don't agree that we should do pretty well everything we can to ensure that kids never start smoking but some of the anti-smoking efforts have come back and bitten us in the butt.
Perhaps a partial solution to the problem of the sight of smokers is to either ban them from mall properties, as the Vancouver Island Health Authority has banned smoking on the hospital property, or to build "smokers' sheds" in a far corner of the mall parking lot, simply a roof, no walls, because any woman smoking in an area with walls is vulnerable to attack. Men, too. And definitely a target for kids either wanting a freebie cigarette, or wlling to pay a price for it.
The problem is: where do you draw the line?
Last edited by Nostradama; 11-07-2009 at 12:52 PM. Reason: verb correction
My main point was not the jobs held at the bingo hall but rather make room for many little/medium size shops to make it a true shopping mall.
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