Street sale and foot traffic
General foot traffic is still way down along Ste-Catherine Street, and the street fair held over the weekend was apparently rather more low-key than usual. I find this bit absolutely ridiculous: “Montreal centre-ville, a downtown merchant’s association, estimates that 500 thousand people walked along this three-kilometre stretch each day of the sale.” Half a million people? Each day? I mean, go ahead, boost downtown, but don’t insult our intelligence.
P.S. to CTV: The street is not called “St-Catherine’s St”.
JP 14:11 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
Also, the way they wrote “500 thousand” seems weird. They should simply write 500,000.
Blork 14:22 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
…or they mean 500-thousand (between 500 and 1000) and they dropped the hyphen accidentally on purpose so it would look like 500,000.
JP 14:58 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
That’s possible.
thomas 15:31 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
From the video it is clear that they mean 500,000.
Some places did very well, though. I saw a line of maybe 200 people for Korean Kogo.
MarcG 15:34 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
A quote from the Gazette article:
Castanheira said the association’s estimates were about 500,000 per day visited the strip on Friday and Saturday, which he said was “absolutely fantastic.”
“It sounds like a lot, and it is, but this is over a three-kilometre span, and on a pre-pandemic day, we would have half a million people per day downtown. It is a big number, but we are used to having big numbers.”
I remember that massive march on May 22, 2012 had an estimated 200-400 thousand people. Things look different when you pile them all together.
Kate 19:50 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
I didn’t go, but I was looking at the corner of Peel and Ste‑Catherine via the traffic cam at that corner, on and off all weekend. I was curious to see how many folks would be there.
Half a million people? No. Not remotely possible.
ant6n 04:55 on 2021-09-14 Permalink
Usually, over two days, every person in Montreal would have visited (>1Mio per day). In fact, even now the shopping crowds are bigger than those of the 2019 climate protest when Greta spoke (>500K).