Toronto's Own Annus Horribilis

Retailers in Woodbridge revisit a troubling summer following SARS and blackouts

Those of us who intend to travel to Italy or some other faraway country in the near future, we could bring a souvenir that is enjoying increasing success: a T-shirt, produced by a Toronto newspaper, that reads "I Survived Toronto" and lists the troubles of our times, including SARS, West Nile Virus, Mad Cow, SARS (once again!). Perhaps a revised version will now add Blackout.
The fact that the first eight months of 2003 were all but easy cannot be disputed: newspaper reports read like pages from the Biblical Exodus, and several entrepreneurs in the GTA have begun to have enough.
In order to understand how much these troubles are impacting on business, we visited Market Lane, a peaceful and laborious square just North of Hwy 7 and Islington, one of the meeting places best loved by our community.
"More than SARS, what really hurt us was the blackout: two days with stores closed in what could well be the only weekend of fair weather of the whole season! Anyway, we shall be able to recover, no doubt about that," said Sara, manager at Brando, one of the trend-setting fashion stores in Woodbridge. She's optimistic and smiling, while stocking shelves with the latest arrivals from fall-winter collections.
Sara represents a midway point between those who feel that 2003 has been and will continue to be a nightmare and those who do not feel particularly touched by the events.
Patrizia, at Wild Orchid Lingerie, is disconsolate: she's had to weather a 50 percent decrease in sales, and says that "what's lost is lost, let's hope that things will be better in the future." "In the past few days," she explained, "people only went out for emergency supplies, in fear of another blackout, and nobody went shopping for anything else."
An explanation of this phenomenon is attempted by Peter Settecase of Maschile Uomo: "Earlier, during the SARS epidemic, people were afraid, perhaps because some of the media kept reporting on the 'active' cases, and stayed at home as much as possible. Now that we were slowly coming out of that psychosis, we've been hit by the blackout: a lot of people lost working days, and so had less money to spend. This crisis, however, is more psychological than real; let's hope that people will soon forget and get used to the new reality. That's the only way the trend could be reversed and we could possibly recover a part of our losses during the coming Christmas season."
Two stores down the street, however, Rosemary of Tesoro Fine Jewellers tells a story unlike anyone else: "My customers only talk about this: now the blackout, SARS before that, but in the end they buy. My business suffered very little."
Similar words came from Brenna, of the Al Solito Posto restaurant: "Our clientele remains the same, crisis or no crisis."

Publication Date: 2003-08-31
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3110