Editor:
As you know, the Banff Tea Company and many town residents have been demonstrating that we don’t want any new competing chain stores in town and that a balance has to be struck (We had 90 people at the rally at town hall and the letters keep flying in to [email protected]). I am convinced that the council members do want to preserve our town and so I have addressed a few key points.
Firstly, the primary role of council is to facilitate the visitor experience in Banff.Isn’t the reason visitors come to this unique place, is to embrace the nature around us and shouldn’t that uniqueness include their retail experience? One of the Town’s revenue goals is to ‘promote opportunities to diversify the tourism product’ and so does this not include it’s retail offering?
One of the key points under the economic goals of the town is to ‘create memorable national park experiences.’ Hosting the same uniform stores and outlets that can be found in any other North American town, is not setting us apart as an attractive town to visit. A memorable experience is one that cannot be easily replicated and this does not simply apply to the uniqueness of our surrounding landscape but also how we serve our visitors.
Secondly, one of the Town’s guiding principles is that it will ‘respond to the feedback, perceptions and recommendations of our visitors’ and those perceptions are that visitors come to Banff to enjoy it’s uniqueness in every aspect including it’s retail and other service industries. Another Community Plan objective in it’s own right is to “promote Banff’s unique mountain community’’ and this community becomes less unique with every local business that is lost.
Finally, the Town also recognises that an integral part of serving the visitor experience is to ‘maintain a community character which is consistent with and reflects the surrounding environment’. Surely businesses giving back to that community, employing local
people and supplying other local establishments is far more in line with the town’s agreed purpose than allowing larger chains to enjoy their economic gains elsewhere.
I know the Town council of Banff can set an example to the rest of Canada by listening to the what the public wants and not be pushed around by larger corporations wanting to feed off what used to be (and could return to) a quaint mountain village with plenty of unique offerings. I strongly encourage them to do so.
Susanne Gillies Smith,
Banff Tea Company
