The bottom line here is that a big name department store will be a draw, much like Hudson's was up to the time it closed... Someone said it was still profitable up until it closed, which means it was still drawing people. If there was a store like this downtown, it would be a destination for people to come. Granted, it would certainly take some time before it was doing really well, but it would happen, and the same with other stores popping up downtown. A store with the name like Macy's would have other stores following right behind it. Where ever they may come from, people would come to a store of this magnitude and when other stores are following behind, it just continues to grow.
There are so many people that make a long trip to go to Sommerset. People come from Canada and Ohio to go to that Macy's store, and with one downtown, it would get business from both the Toledo area and Canada. If there was just an anchor store on Woodward, so many other stores would pop up, because it is the anchor store that draws them in. Just because there aren't many more than 50,000 people in the CBD on a daily basis, doesn't mean people won't come from the suburbs if a decent store is built there.
Unfortunately, the city has no money to pay for tax credits, merely tax abatements. But if the city officials really wanted to do something, they could find a way to make it work.
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