Much has been said over the past several months about efforts to revive the downtown district.
Getting people to think positively again about downtown is a challenge, given the disrepair the area fell into in the last number of years.
But there is new optimism about the future of downtown. A downtown business improvement district has been established and with it have come efforts to clean up the area and hold events to attract people to the downtown core.
Downtown North Battleford Executive Director Lisa McEachern and the rest of the BID team have been thinking up some bright ideas to try to drum up positive interest in downtown.
Their most recent initiative, called "Discover Downtown," was geared directly to the media. According to the letter sent by the BID, "Discover Downtown is an opportunity for local media personalities to experience downtown and share it with their audience."
We were issued a $100 RBC Visa gift card and given a challenge: spend our card at three downtown businesses not typically patronized.
The biggest challenge initially was figuring out if we actually had any notable "media personalities" here at the News-Optimist. We finally concluded we didn't have any, but we had space to fill in the paper, so it was decided I should use the gift card and write the story.
Besides, we were happy to do a positive story about good things happening downtown.
Choosing downtown businesses that I had never been to before proved an easy challenge for me to take up because, sadly, I haven't done very much shopping downtown - not even at some of the more notable places that have been around a long time.
Like many in the Battlefords, I normally shop at retailers in either the southeast quadrant or the north end in the city. Whenever I ventured downtown, it was usually for a trip to the bank, or a work-related assignment - City Hall or the courts.
For me, this was a chance to discover things about downtown that I hadn't experienced before and perhaps encourage some of you to think about doing the same.
With Jayne Foster joining me to take pictures, I began my shopping journey at Milbanke's Flowers on 100th Street, where I was looking for possible ideas for a gift for mom for Christmas.
The store featured a colourful array Christmas poinsettias, as well as other items. There was an array of elephant-themed gift items there, which intrigued me since my dad is South African and has a number of African-themed items at the house, so an elephant seemed to fit right in.
Ultimately I decided on a Christmas cactus houseplant as a gift for Mom. The reason I settled on that was because I liked the idea of something that was low maintenance. Also, I didn't want something that would attract bugs, which can be an issue with other plants.
Initially, though, I put the order on "hold" so that I could come back and pick up the plant later on that day, the idea being to keep it away from the cold weather as long as possible.
We looked around other parts of 100th Street including the menu at a restaurant in the Beaver Hotel, and then made our way to 101st Street looking for more ideas.
I decided pretty early on that I wasn't going to let my gift card go to waste. I was going to be my usual finicky self when it came to shopping. I'm notorious for being a very tough customer at the best of times, and it's difficult to impress.
We looked around the two Jeans and Joggers stores downtown and ventured into the Scandinavian Home Bakery and then the Danish Home Bakery, looking for some deals. In the Danish bakery we were in luck. They had some chocolate chip cookies on sale for $4.75, so I bought those with my gift card for the office and we ended up eating them all week back in the newsroom.
After that, we made our way up the street to Bill & Don's Men's Wear where I decided to look for a tie to get for my dad for Christmas. Storeowner Ben Christensen showed off the ties that were offered in the $45 range.
There were quite a few good ones, one of them featured white dots, which was eye-catching for sure. In the end, though, I finally picked one that had a few stripes on it. They gave me a discount on it, too, so I ended up using only around $42 on the gift card.
Counting the Christmas cactus that I still had to go back and officially purchase, I had accounted for roughly $70 of my $100 gift card.
I had met the challenge of using the gift card at three downtown businesses, with $30 left to spare, but I still needed to use the remaining amount up.
I decided to go to Miami Tanning and Clothing on 102nd Street, hoping to purchase some Saskatchewan Roughriders souvenirs.
Unfortunately the Riders' Grey Cup items had not arrived yet and were expected to show up later on in the day. So I held off on spending any of the gift card on items in that store for the time being.
Jayne and I did find an adjoining restaurant or café called Miami Paninis and Smoothies. The place was kind of hidden away inside the Miami Tanning building so a lot of you may not know about it -- it really is a hidden gem in the downtown and had nice décor, with pictures of New York City in it. I ended up having a burger, fries and Five Alive juice for lunch.
Afterwards I headed over to Milbanke's to pick up my Christmas cactus and they swiped my gift card there.
My final stop of the day was to Logan's Audio and Video, but I didn't find an item that interested me in my modest price range. I noticed they had a number of impressive-looking televisions on display there.
That pretty much wrapped up the shopping for the day, but I still hadn't used up all the cash on my Visa gift card Tuesday.
I returned to Miami Tanning and Clothing on Friday afternoon. Their Grey Cup souvenirs were now in stock, so, with the help of my gift card and with some additional funds I had, I purchased a 2013 Saskatchewan Roughriders Grey Cup T-shirt to send to my brother for Christmas.
That gives you an idea about the range of items I was able to purchase downtown with a gift card of $100. Hopefully this gives you some ideas about some of the places where you might be interested in going to for your shopping spree.
I really enjoyed taking up the Discover Downtown shopping challenge and hope to return downtown again to do more shopping in the future.
