Job fair for new Tsawwassen Mall draws hundreds

More than 300 people lined up at Canada Place Saturday for the chance to work at Metro Vancouver’s newest outlet mega-mall.

Tsawwassen Mills is set to open October 5 on land owned by the Tsawwassen First Nation at Highway 17 and 52nd Street.

Once complete, Tsawwassen Mills — with more than 1.2-million square feet of retail space at 200 stores — will boast 16 anchor tenants, and an 1,100-seat food court. The Tsawwassen First Nation is banking on the project, which will be more than three times the size of the McArthurGlen Designer Outlet mall near Vancouver International Airport.

McArthurGlen stopped traffic when it opened last July, as a crush of shoppers created chaos near YVR.

Retail expert David Ian Gray of DIG360 Consulting says the fact both McArthurGlen and Tsawwassen Mills are outlet malls will alone draw traffic, as Vancouver lacks similar retail opportunities.

And with Tsawwassen Mills just minutes from the ferry terminal and 30 minutes from the United States-Canada border, he predicts it will attract both Vancouver Island and American customers.

“With the dollar exchange the way it is plus the idea that we have outlets here, the novelty of going across the U.S. border to get to those are being removed,” he says.

Tsawwassen Mills’ general manager Mark Fenwick says he’s hoping the weekend job fair will attract up to 3,000 applicants over two days. He says the hiring blitz will fill only a fraction of the jobs the massive outlet mall will create once it opens in the fall.