New container market coming to downtown Prince George

“You hear about these success stories of businesses that started out at places like farmers markets and then were able to establish themselves and then become retail stores or things like that. That’s kind of the hope (that) we can provide a really low barrier to someone who wants to sell their goods or their product out of a portion of one of these containers and then hopefully that gets their foot in the door,” said Tourism Prince George CEO Colin Carson.

“We’d like to embrace it as an incubator. So if they (container market businesses) come downtown and they are able to establish a customer base, maybe they’ll think that this is something that they would like to grow, in terms of their own particular business and their own products,” said Downtown Prince George Executive Director Colleen Van Mook.

While there are no concrete plans yet, Carson and Van Mook both spoke of the container market working with the already existing farmers market, and similar to the farmers market Carson hopes to have a weekly schedule so people will know when to visit the shops. However, given its location in front of the Conference and Civic Centre, Carson added there will be many opportunities for pop up markets to take advantage of events.

“The other big opportunity we have here, standing in front of the Conference and Civic Center, is there are thousands of people that come here every week for different events. So we want to make sure it’s flexible enough that if there’s a big event inside, we can have this open and really enhance that experience for those visitors as well,” Carson said.

While the benefit to the small businesses in the container markets is quiet clear, Van Mook added she believes this is also a great opportunity to highlight Prince George’s downtown as a whole.

“This is an opportunity to attract people to come downtown, enjoy the gathering place that I really envision that Tourism Prince George is going to create through their visitor centre and through this activation, but also visit the great local entrepreneurs that we have in our downtown,” Van Mook said.

Van Mook says the impact of foot traffic for the container market could pay dividends for local businesses downtown, as most businesses aren’t a long walk away and there is a lot to offer. Pointing to downtown’s 32 restaurants, more than 80 retail establishments, and more, Van Mook says the container market could elevate all of downtown’s business.

“There is lots of places where you can shop and you can pamper yourself, because we definitely have a lot of beauty and spas downtown. And there’s also lots of things to do: we have the library, we have a museum, we have two bowling alleys, we have amazing bookstores,” she continued.

Canada Games Plaza already has one container set up, which is the temporary Visitor Information Centre for Tourism Prince George, as the new location in the Civic Centre is still undergoing renovations

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by Tommy Osborne

New container market coming to downtown Prince George

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