Eaton Centre

Eaton Centre is a name associated with shopping malls in Canada, originating with Eaton's, one of Canada's largest department store chains at the time that these malls were developed. Eaton's partnered with development companies throughout the 1970s and 1980s to develop downtown shopping malls in cities across Canada. Each mall contained an Eaton's store, or was in close proximity to an Eaton's store, and typically the mall itself carried the "Eaton Centre" name. These joint ventures were a significant retail development trend in Canada during that period.

With the demise of the Eaton's chain in 1999, and the retiring of the Eaton's name as a retail banner in 2002, most of these malls have been renamed. As of today only the Toronto and Montreal Eaton Centres retain the Eaton name. Some malls in smaller urban areas, which were typically the least successful of all the Eaton Centre developments, have been demolished or converted to other, non-retail uses.

Although neither has ever carried the Eaton name (both did, however, contain Eaton's stores), these two malls were developed by the Eaton's chain and its partners, and both are "Eaton Centres" in all but name.

Commencing in the early 1970s, Ontario's provincial government poured millions of dollars over the course of a decade into the ODRP program in order to revitalize the downtown retail areas of smaller communities throughout the Province. Typically, this involved the construction of new downtown malls to compete with growing suburban shopping opportunities.

However, there was no business case or market analysis to justify the construction of these downtown malls. Many residents noted that the enclosed facilities represented the antithesis to the one unique aspect of downtown shopping, street-related stores. Often the new downtown mall had a "vacuum cleaner" effect of attracting the stronger street boutiques away from their neighborhoods to become tenants in unstable shopping centres. The lack of free parking in the downtown area was the number one impetus for residents flocking to suburban malls which had free parking, which did not help the cause of the downtown malls whose garages charged fees, collected by the municipalities who usually financed the construction mall garages.

Nonetheless, in a highly criticized business decision, Eaton's became a partner in the program, and its stores served as the anchor tenant in many of these malls. As stated in The Globe and Mail newspaper, "The history of retailing is filled with tales of merchants who were brilliantly prescient in their location choices, and others who totally misread their markets and fell flat. In the 1970s, the T. Eaton Co. became a textbook example of the latter when it built huge department stores in the increasingly empty downtowns of small Canadian cities; far from reviving the cores, the stores failed as consumers kept taking their business to suburban malls." Conventional wisdom held that only larger cities with populations of 200,000 or greater had a wealthy enough clientele to support upscale department stores such as Eaton's or The Bay, and communities with populations of 100,000 or less were already well-served by existing retailers, such as discount stores Zellers and Woolco, and the lower-end department store Sears Canada.

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