The Unknown Mall

The Cloverdale Mall is not the only covered mall that our small town has seen. Back in 1980 a new mall opened on the south side of Highway 10, inbetween 177B Street and 176th Street, approximately where the stores of Clover Village Square currently are situated. Unfortunately I do not remember the name of this mall.

The Co-op grocery store and Boot’s drugstore anchored the east end of the mall. Unfortunately after several year’s absence from Cloverdale, and a bevy of addle-brained cashiers, the Co-op’s grocery store was unable to make a go of it. By this time most of Cloverdale had decided not to shop at the leaky Safeway and had found new grocery stores in Langley including the newly opened mega grocery store, Save-On Foods on the Fraser Highway.

The Boot’s drug store chain is popular in England and had big hopes of bringing in an ex-patriot crew to shop at the franchise in Cloverdale. Instead their high prices kept most Cloverdale patrons going to Shopper’s Drug Mart in the Cloverdale Mall, or Kuss’s Pharmacy on the main street. I don’t remember what came first, the Cloverdale Boot’s closing down, or the drugstore’s nationwide closure.

On the west side of the mall was Surrey Credit Union and a restaurant called Hale & Hearty’s. Inside the mall were the usual assortment of clothing and record stores.

Right from the beginning the mall never had many customers. The stores had more employees than there were customers shopping there. I remember hanging out a friend’s house one Friday night and her parents went out to check out the new mall. They returned a short time later and said there were six people shopping in the mall that night.

A friend of mine worked at Surrey Credit Union and she said that patrons of the Co-op were all given $5 vouchers as part of a promotion. The catch was they had to come down to Surrey Credit Union to cash it in and get their five bucks. The object was to get people walking through the mall and shopping. All to no avail.

Within a year many of the stores had closed down. By the mid-80’s a couple of stores inside the mall were still open. My doctor’s office was inside that mall for a period of time until she moved to a new clinic a block away in the late 80’s. Surrey Credit Union became Surrey Metro Savings and remained open. Also not closing down was Hale & Hearty’s restaurant which had pretty decent food for a good price and was a favorite hang out for the race track crowd, but was closed when I returned in 1992 with a friend to go for dinner. L

One credit union can not be financially feasible for the mall owners who had lots of empty retail space including 2 rather large locations, the former Co-op grocery store and Boot’s locations. By the mid-90’s the mall was demolished and eventually the Clover Square Village and their stores came into being.

So about 15 years for this mall. The Cloverdale Mall is still standing 35 years after it opened and is still the winner. And I use that term in the loosest sense because a mall that does not have any stores inside for shopping is not a mall. In my opinion.

Maybe Cloverdale was just not meant to have indoor shopping malls. The outside strip malls seem to be more to the liking of this community.