Victoria’s Sears Canada store, an anchor tenant in Hillside Shopping Centre since 1969, could soon close its doors, leaving about 110 employees without jobs.
The struggling retailer has sought to liquidate its remaining 130 stores, including the one at the Hillside Shopping Centre.
“Shopping centres have been getting pounded in recent years in relation to the threat and loss of anchor tenants,” said David Ian Gray of DIG360 Consulting Ltd.
The loss to the Hillside mall, he said, strikes at many levels: It’s a huge retail space that few, if any, other tenants can fill, and reconfiguring the store for multiple retailers could be costly. There’s the loss of rent, jobs and traffic for other tenants in that end of mall — as well as the loss of another iconic Canadian store.
“It’s sad, but when it no longer is what people want or people are not spending enough there …,” Gray said. “Sears really does represent Canada.”
In the short term, said University of Victoria professor Brock Smith, the closure of an anchor tenant “means one less reason to go to Hillside.”
“On the other hand, they have Canadian Tire, Sport Chek, Atmosphere, Marshalls, and many, many interesting stores that provide lots of other reasons to go there,” Smith said.
He agrees the space will likely be split up rather than taken over by a single store.
“Wouldn’t one of those new Collection Point Ikeas be great there?” he mused.
The Sears chain, which started in 1952 as a mail-order business, has two main locations on Vancouver Island — in Victoria and Nanaimo — with a total of 214 employees, a spokesperson for the company said Tuesday.
There are smaller Sears Hometown Stores in Duncan and Parksville, as well as some locations within other businesses.
Sears announced last month that it planned to close the Nanaimo North Town Centre store as part of court-supervised restructuring.
The first phase of the Hillside mall opened in February 1969 with Simpsons-Sears as its anchor tenant.
Its second phase brought the shopping centre to 400,000 square feet of retail space, with room for 26 more stores and a department store.
Bentall Kennedy announced in December 2013 that it had purchased Hillside Shopping Centre from the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board for its Prime Canadian Property Fund.
— With a file from Carla Wilson
