Dancing Goat Kabin Closes

Dancing Goat Kabin & Front Street Bar & Grill
75 Front St. Shuts Doors

Employees Left Unpaid

Another local small business has been unable to keep operating and closed up shop over this last weekend. The closure came as a shock to employees who were unable to cash their pay cheques and had no notice of the pending closure.

In recent years several businesses have attempted to make a go of this location which does not seem to generate sufficient traffic to succeed. Perhaps some businesses have over estimated the kind of traffic that Pacifica and the new condos on Chapel St. would have generated.

Recently a downtown bar owner has resorted to engaging strippers to try and boost lagging sales in what is being described as a dying business as more and more people seem to purchase beer and wine from outlets and consume them at home rather than going to the bar.

Downtown Nanaimo, for all of the money that has been poured into it in the last decade is likely a very challenging place to do business unless you have something very unique and are a savvy business person. Sadly, many enterprises are started as Mom and Pops who have mortgaged the homestead or liquidated their savings to pursue the dream of owning their own business.

A sure indication of the difficulty of doing business downtown is the amount of vacant storefronts, not the least of which is the retail space on Commercial Street which is part of the conference centre building. With the recent closure of the dollar store there is very little retail space being rented in what would appear to be a prime location.

Things downtown are not likely to improve anytime soon as long as city hall and city council maintain their myopic view that a conference centre is going to be the saviour of downtown. RETAIL is what will be the saviour of downtown, not conference centres, something which staff and council are completely reluctant to acknowledge and there seems no limit to the amount of taxpayer dollars they are willing to spend to prove their point.