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| The Bloedel Conservatory, one of my favorite non-retail spots in Vancouver |
On this 4th of July, it's only appropriate I talk about... Canada! 😉 As you all know, I spent last week in Vancouver and the surrounding area, and despite a few setbacks, I got to see a lot of really cool stuff while I was there -- and as has become my habit recently, this is going to be a highlights/teaser post. I know last week I mentioned that I wasn't feeling super confident that I would get to a lot of retail sights on this trip; in the end, only a few places ended up getting cut due to it being more trouble than it was worth to get to them, and the roughly 950 photos added to my backlog show that I must have gotten over my angst around retail photography (some tours didn't turn out quite as I would have wanted, and some of that may have been due to nerves, but whatever).
Huge thanks to Anonymous in Houston for reminding me of London Drugs -- they have a ton of stores that are still super retro and cool!
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| Sadly, their stores don't seem to be very well maintained -- I went to quite a few, and there are some neon elements that were broken at every store I saw them. |
And yes, I also stopped by a Canadian Tire -- though I honestly found their stores to be fairly boring.
Even though I'm really not a mall person, there turned out to be quite a few cool malls in the Vancouver area, so those made up a surprisingly large proportion of the photos I took on this trip!
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| International Village Mall, right across from where I stayed |
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| Also International Village Mall! |
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| Lansdowne Center, a chrome palace |
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| Coquitlam Centre, with wood and stained glass ceilings |
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| The City of Lougheed |
And, of course, some Safeways, both old and new!
And that's just a brief sampling of the things that fit neatly into a teaser post! There's so much cool stuff that I'm excited to show you all, but seeing as I just added nearly a year to my backlog (and most of that in short sets, which as I've mentioned previously, I had an overabundance of already), so it will be a while until the full tours to most of these photos will show up... but me being who I am, I'm sure some tours from this trip will jump to the front the line and start showing up soon!
Whoa, those London Drugs photos are spectacular! I've been transported back to 1993 just seeing those! I can't wait to see more. I've known that London Drugs is quite an odd retailer with an odd mix of products for a drugstore, and I know some of their locations are kind of retro, but that dose of retroness in your photos is even more than I was expecting!
ReplyDeleteCanadian Tire stores might not be the most interesting places around, but it's another strange format of a store kind of like London Drugs. In some ways, it's perhaps what Sears should have become, but didn't.
Canadian malls are pretty spectacular, but I only saw one that was as retro as what you've shown here! Again, I can't wait to see that. It should be really good.
That first Safeway photo is what I'd expect from a Safeway, but the other two show how far Safeway Canada has separated themselves from the US Safeway under new ownership. It'll be interesting to see those kind of Safeways!
What's really crazy about London Drugs is that they still have a ton of super-retro stores like that -- the decor package in those pictures is by far the most common retro decor they have, but there are a few others too.
DeleteI was honestly surprised by how many cool malls Vancouver has -- I would have thought that a city like that, with the crazy amount of development it's seen lately, would have lost its older malls by now, but obviously not! They also have some cool brand-new malls too, much more interesting than what the US has.
Safeway Canada is certainly an interesting mix of old things (like old Lifestyle stores untouched by the post-Albertsons modifications, the "Ingredients for Life" slogan that is even more prominent now than when Safeway itself used it, and even some products still using the Lucerne brand and the packaging Safeway used at the time of the split) and new concepts taken from the rest of Sobeys. It's quite strange, and that's something I feel like I only scratched the surface of on this trip.
Very cool stuff! Glad the trip went well, and looking forward to all the new content!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteYou're welcome!
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