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Businesses bustle with SVMF traffic

Sales up, while foot traffic comparable to last year, says store employee
Rebecca Aldous
Annie Turgeon and her almost three-year-old daughter Lylah McDonald play around with chalk at the On The Street event in downtown ӣƵon Saturday (Aug. 9). The On The Street event included music and performances on Cleveland Avenue. It was hosted by the ӣƵDowntown Business Improvement Association to help draw ӣƵValley Music Festival ticket holders into town.

The ӣƵValley Music Festival (SVMF) weekend not only broke records in crowd turnout, but also in shopper foot traffic.

“It was crazy busy,” Shukuko Abe said on Monday, Aug. 11. “The last two days we hit record [sales].”

The owner of the Naked Lunch restaurant saw a huge spike in consumers over the four-day event. ӣƵElementary School’s field, which is less than a kilometre away from the café at Chieftain Centre, became a tent city filled with hungry campers.

Stores along Cleveland Avenue also felt the influx. Wild and Heart saw a spike in walk-in visits, as well as online traffic, the clothing store’s co-owner Sarah Johnson said.

“A lot of people follow us on social media and came to the event and wanted to check us out,” she said.

The festival-goers fit the shop’s target market. Johnson hopes that the in-store visits from people out of town will translate into more online consumers.

“We had a lot of international customers,” she said.

Sales throughout Aug. 7 to Aug. 10, almost doubled that of The Ledge Cafe’s biggest day, Nick Koole said.

However, the weekend didn’t feel any busier than the previous year’s festival, he said.

“We were pretty well prepared for it,” he acknowledged.

The event went really well, ӣƵBusiness Improvement Association executive director Christine Bennett said. The organization ran the second annual On the Street event in conjunction with the music festival. A portion of Cleveland Avenue was closed down and music and entertainment packed the block to entice festival ticket holders to explore ӣƵbefore heading to the concerts, which started at 1 p.m.

“It was a huge success,” Bennett said.

In 2013, the SVMF generated $18.7 million worth of economic activity for the province and pumped $9.9 million into Squamish’s economy, stated organizers.

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