The Coming of Amazon

Hamilton is now officially part of the latest super trend in consumerism. Over the last half century city, this is at least number four. Back in the 1960s before centennial year, the newest thing was Centre Mall – initially an open-air row of stores on the north side of Barton Street that later were enclosed.

Up to that point, the commercial centre of Hamilton had been its downtown. The shift to buying at malls accelerated rapidly with the opening of Eastgate and then Limeridge, and spurred a desperate attempt to revive downtown by replacing dozens of businesses with another mall - the Lloyd D Jackson Square.

All this was heralded as progress but actually was just a replacement of one commercial model with a different one. Within a few years it was clear to everyone that the new malls had drained commerce from the commercial heart of Hamilton formerly centred on the intersection of King and James.

That massive destruction of small businesses was also accompanied by the malls’ replacement of hundreds of acres of farm fields and wetlands and forests with parking lots and one or two storey commercial buildings where “you could find everything”.

It was not accompanied by the ecological revitalization of the former downtowns in Hamilton or its suburbs. Instead the net result was just more buildings, more parking lots and much more driving to “find everything”.

Next came the big box complex that in Hamilton was headlined by the Meadowlands which undercut the businesses at Limeridge. Acres more foodlands, wetlands and forests made way for a new marketing model - one that you not only had to drive to, but also had to drive between its various big box pieces. The malls were outdated, so yesterday, and steadily losing customers and commercial significance.

The anchor retail giants left the malls for independence as individual pieces of the new big box complexes. Walmart at Eastgate moved a few blocks down Centennial to the box complex beside the QEW. Centre Mall was torn down to be replaced by The Centre at Barton boxes. This eliminated the food courts where lower income residents, seen as undesirables, had tended to congregate and not spend much money. The most recent evidence of the decline of the malls in Hamilton is the announcement that Eastgate will shift to a largely residential complex.

But look again and now the big box complex super trend is on its way out as well. So-called bricks and mortar stores are being replaced by e-commerce led by Amazon. Instead of taking transit downtown or having to drive to pick up a few things at the mall or the big box complex, there’s a new model. Each individual item is now delivered to you by truck – more emissions, more noise, more rapid deterioration of public roads – and much more money for the new kings of commerce.

The big box complex model is accompanied by warehouses or so-called ‘fulfillment’ centres. More acres of foodlands, wetlands and forests are being sacrificed to accommodate the warehouses currently sprouting on prime agricultural land near the airport. Apparently, the industrially zoned land along Burlington Street can’t compete, despite being adjacent to the QEW, the mainline CN railway, and the busiest port on the Great Lakes.

Each step along the way the civic fathers have welcomed the “new investments and new taxes”, but neglected to count the lost taxes as the earlier commercial centres collapsed. As the displaced businesses went under, the building owners got tax cuts from lower assessments. However each step of alleged progress has also required more municipal infrastructure – more roads, more traffic and damage to those roads, longer water and sewer pipes, and more areas demanding “revitalization”.

Each step along the way the civic boosters have acclaimed the arrival of more jobs, but haven’t noticed the disappearance of far more jobs from the earlier commercial outlets. This has been accompanied by lower wage scales for the allegedly less skilled warehouse workforce, as well as more of these employees replaced by centralization and robotics.

And each step along the way, the biodiversity and climate crises have been worsened, local food has become harder to obtain, the costs to the individual shopper have increased, and usually the quality and durability of what is being purchased has decreased. It’s what’s called progress or the market economy.