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Farewell to the Tisdale Mall
Tisdale,
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
by Timothy W. Shire
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Tisdale Mall was a thriving shopping location when we moved to Tisdale in 1995. It had Zellers, OK Economy, Radio Shack and a host of other businesses. We began our computer business that year and it was exciting to participate in Midnight Madness and we even seriously considered getting ourselves space in the mall for our business.

But, with Extra Foods running itself into the ground and closing, the mall simply was no longer sustainable.
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It's just my nature to always feel pretty negative about destruction. The mentality of a throw away society never really caught on in my family and to see a whole building destroyed is unpleasant. People explain to me that the cost of repair far exceeded demolition and reconstruction, but certainly salvage might be an alternative.

As it turned out, when the time came to begin the process, the doors were opened and people were invited to come and help themselves. Alas, there were no takers. However, some of the siding was removed as you can see in two of these pictures.
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The Beeline Co-op purchased the whole site and is planning to establish a new food store and lumber yard on the location.

The common sense reality is that the new food store location demands the use of a car, so it would seem, that if you have to drive over there, it is only twenty minutes to Melfort, where there will be three big grocery stores, or thirty minutes to Nipawin, where there are already three fine food stores.

It is even more disturbing that a very sizeable portion of Tisdale's population are senior citizens, who purchased, or rent, in one of the five apartments or condos within a block of the present store so they could shop for themselves, without a car. Without affordable public transit in Tisdale, it would seem their decision to locate here was a mistake and many will move away and in the future, it will be a hard sell to attract seniors to live in Tisdale, with its health system and grocery store not located in the centre of the town.

Through the years many stories involving the mall have been posted on this web site. You can browse through some of these using the menu on the left hand side of the page.
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