Till next week.

I promised to make an important announcement today. You’ll find it in this post. Unfortunately, I am not ready to make the full announcement I was planning. The announcement I’ll make today is truly the most important I’ve ever made on this blog, but the rest of the announcement will have to wait about a week till I am ready.

Four years ago today, I made the first post on this blog.

It’s been fun. I’ve made some blogging friends. I’ve had some impressive visitors who’ve left comments. I hope I’ve helped some other people along the way too.

I did a lot of things wrong when I started this blog.

It’s got that stupid .info domain name. I did not really know what I was going to do with this blog when I started it. It has sort of meandered around different topics and not had a clear message and theme. At least not as clear as it should be. It seems to get the most search engine traffic for the keywords hair salon in Pacific Mall, Toronto. Did I mention it has that stupid .info domain name?

After four years, it really has not gotten very far.

I have other sites that get far more traffic. I have other sites that make far more money. I can stumble a page on another site and bring more traffic there than any post on this site will get naturally. I get far more spam comments than real comments. It’s kinda sad, really.

So, the most important announcement ever on this blog (till next week) is:

I am giving up on Digital Key.

Rest in Peace Digitalkeyto.info

I will soon no longer be promoting this site. I don’t expect to be making many posts in the future, although I may still make the occasional rant (without trying to criticize anyone in particular). I’ll probably make some feel good posts that I like to write, like the post before this : “I am not going to die here.”

For the most part, after the announcment next week, this blog will be dead.

Make sure you read that post, or you’ll miss something truly big.

My wife and I are leaving in the next few minutes for Toronto, Ontario.

We will be visiting family and doing the tourist thing.

We will be spending some time in Chinatown as normal. I’ll be sure to make a stop at the Pacific Mall (just because it is cool). This time, we are also planning to visit a few other places around Toronto.

This year we should not be getting lost like the last time we went to Toronto.

We bought a Garmin Nuvi 750 GPS. Around town it had been fun to play with. We’ll see how it works for the longer trip and where we do not know where we are going. The mp3 player built in is handy.

I hope to be online a bit and make some posts from Toronto.

One of the coolest retail malls I’ve seen anywhere

*Update-check out the latest post about the Pacific Mall in Toronto here it includes a video*

The Pacific Mall in Toronto is one of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen.

It was one of my favorite places that we visited while we are in Toronto.  In fact, we visited several times.  I have not seen a mall similar to this anywhere else.

Imagine 200 to 300 stores under one roof.

Unlike typical malls, that have a few major chain stores separated by smaller chain or franchise stores, nearly all the stores are about the same size. They are all fairly small stores I’m guessing maybe 16 x 20 feet in size. They’re arranged in a grid pattern of several rows with the outside walls of each store made of glass.

My guess is that it would cost much less to rent one of these smaller spaces than a full-size store in a mall.

This makes starting a small business a little bit more affordable. It also provides more variety for customers under one roof. Having many different stores to choose from in one place, increases the chance of customers coming to mall for any reason.

There is a lot of variety but there could be more.

There are lots of cell phone dealers. Possibly even more DVD and CD stores (including a lot of pirated movies). Vitamin stores and Asian health food stores. There are a lot of hair salons. Nearly all the stores being towards Chinese or Asian tastes.

There is a lot of duplication of what is for sale.

The DVD stores in the cell phone dealers make up a large chunk of the businesses. They all sell the same thing. They all must compete with each other basically on price, with those being near a main entrance being able to get away with a little bit higher priced as long as people don’t shop. Still there’s a lot to see and it’s a lot of fun.

There are a couple of other malls in Toronto that seem to be modeling themselves after the Pacific Mall.

We watched two security guards help a little lost boy search for his parents in one of them.

None of them, however, offers as many many stores or seem to be quite as successful. One mall shares its parking lot with Pacific Mall. This mall is really more of a traditional design with a couple Asian grocery stores at opposing ends. A mall just across the street from the Pacific Mall is using the same design but is much smaller. It was only open a few months before we visited so there weren’t very many stores in it yet. Both of these malls probably benefit from being close to the Pacific Mall.

Finally, we came across this restaurant on our way to the Pacific Mall one day.

It is the Very Fair Chinese restaurant. I’m not sure, but it could be the same Very Fair restaurant that the famous John Chow ate at. I’m not sure it is the same because he said he ate at the Very Fair Seafood Restaurant and the sign does not mention seafood. We did not eat there though.