Swift Current's Shopping Mall

FTLComm - Swift Current - February 22, 2001  
Wednesday afternoon it was time to take a look around Swift Current's shopping centres. Swift Current has had a shopping mall for a long time with Woolco and Coop serving as the two anchor stores. Only a few blocks East is the mall anchored by Zellers and Safeway. Together these two sprawlling facilities serve a huge agricultural market area for the whole Southwestern portion of Saskatchewan. Though agriculture has been suffering both of these shopping centres are doing their best to hang on. The Coop/Wheatland mall is pretty well running full while a few store fronts in the newer Zellers/Safeway mall are closed as Bata Shoes and a couple other large distributors have called it quits.

The Safeway/Zellers mall has a very distinctive and perhaps one might even consider an aesthetic nature to it with two stores providing art and decorative materials and another focusing on collectables and those hard to find features that
add so considerably to decorating a home or apartment.  

The mall itself is a place of outstanding beauty with wide open spaces and an atmosphere that seems to match the countryside in which it is located. The food court in the mall was quiet late Wednesday afternoon as the shopping day wound down. It had been senior's day with Safeway having free coffee and cookies at its main entrance.
   
   
Shopping malls all seem to have a kind of "mall" flavour to them but this one seems to break the mold in many ways and the Intersport store is just one of the many stores that has been able to look pleasant and give the visiting shopper an inviting and friendly place to look around.

This shopper is a mere four days old. He was born on Sunday arriving in this world at about seven and half pounds joining a two and half year old brother.

The spacious and uncluttered look of this mall is really illustrated by this image where we are in front of the giant Zellers outlet and look down the mall to the West.

There is a distinct feel of an "upscale" mall that you sometimes find in larger centres where the stores are a little more exclusive and the prices a little higher. Though this mall remains competitive it still is able to give the shopper that feeling that this a special place. The use of natural light and high ceilings really makes this long stretch seem much shorter.

Directly across the way from Safeway and setting the tone for the mall is the TB Art shop which sells original art work, prints and handles framing and mounting. Though the store is really attractive what caught my eye was the excellent display of prints focusing on hockey in one of the store's display windows (below right).

Off from the main corridore and across from the food court is the window display above of beautiful blankets, the odd thing about this display is that it is part of a sixty-minute photo and photography shop.

The window display above and the one on the left of of a really great shop selling curios, candles, wicker, decorative and art products. Shops like this are found in many communities but this is really a big one crowded with fascinating products while not smelling like a soap factory.
On one of the South entrances to the mall is this remarkable shop that looks like its time has come. This shop provides customers with a facility to have their pictures enlarged, printed and mounted for display on their walls. The company relies upon a big version of the typical inkjet printer you probably have hooked up to your computer and with this HP printer running on a roll of photo paper or other matte or canvas media the customer can create their own art from their photographs.