|
LAS VEGAS — It’s amazing the business concepts that are possible when there are lots of people around. Take I Love Sugar, for instance. Two floors of hyperglycemic-inducing confections, from PEZ candy and dispensers to 2.5-kilogram gummy bears.
There’s so much sugar here, your dopamine levels rise just walking in. They couldn’t contain it to one floor, so you can go upstairs and get your chocolate fix in or sidle up to the Sugar Martini Bar for an alcoholic means of raising your blood sugar.
Across the pedestrian corridor behind the LINQ is a selfie museum. You read that right, a museum devoted to an art form (if you can call it that) that can be as annoying as it can be satisfying (for the taker, anyway).
Advertisement
For US$600 you can rent a Lamborghini Huracan. For a few hours, anyway.
But forget for a moment our roads would eat Italian for lunch, what struck me about Vegas is how it’s the antithesis of what’s not, currently, working in Winnipeg. With enough people, even the most niche businesses can thrive.
With a pandemic hangover of work-from-home keeping too much of downtown empty, here, even conventional, tried-and-true business concepts are struggling. People, lots of people, cure a lot of inner-city ills.
Excellent examples are Detroit, a city that at its low point would have more empty shell casings on the streets at times than people. There was a time when a leisurely stroll from GM’s Renaissance Center to the Detroit Auto Show was ill-advised, even in broad daylight.
Yet, riding on some key investments, including by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and some major relocations by global corporations, Detroit is as hot as it’s ever been. A lot of that has to do with residential development downtown, as even Detroit wouldn’t prosper based solely on nightly imports from the suburbs.
There are restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, Lions and Red Wings games, riverside parks and cafés, and even the odd speakeasy, which harkens back to Prohibition days with nondescript entrances and a veil of secrecy. It’s all pretty cool if you’ve never been.
Winnipeg could do the same, and it’s trying. Sure, there are suburbanites who have good reasons for living where they do, but give a downtown a healthy vibe and young professionals will dig it.
It will take a few key steps, however, one of which may be negotiating back to office-based employment. The suburban helicopter workers — who drop in for the day and scurry home at night — are good for lunch spots, less so for dinner or after-hours events.
Winnipeg Jets games are a good draw, but even they can leave downtown less than perfect, especially if people watch the game, eat at the arena and then go home. A good indication may be the extent to which a number of businesses on the Jets’ glide path — the walkways and tunnels — don’t even open for the crowds passing by.
All these are good steps but a downtown needs residents, a pool of prospects who are there 24/7.
I know some of you may think, “But who wants to live downtown?” and that’s fine. If the ‘burbs are your cup of tea, all the power to you. But as successful downtowns around the world prove every day, a good downtown is a sought-after location for living. For the right people, at least.
I’m not riffing off Free Press coverage for this newsletter topper: I’m here in the desert to attend the Vegas Shoot, the world’s largest — by far — archery tournament. This year, more than 4,500 archers are competing, so much that the tournament is moving next year. We don’t know where, but we expect to hear the announcement Sunday during the finals and the grand finale.
|
