To think they were the original Amazon where people would order stuff from a catalog and receive it by mail.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Hasn’t Hudson’s Bay previously liquidated?
I love a bit of heritage but HB is a business. They’ve failed to stay relevant in the economy and they’re faltering. Okay, bye? Am I supposed to feel bad that a corporation might disappear?
Well, it's going out of business because it's owned by an American real-estate hedge fund who has been deliberately driving it into the ground.
At the end of the day, all of that retail real estate is going to be parcelled up and leased to other companies - probably American.
There are no more Canadian department stores. Woodwards, Eaton's Simpsons-Sears, Zellers, Woolco, and now The Bay. They've all been destroyed by Walmart and Amazon. Beaver, Rona, and Peavey Mart are all destroyed or consumed by Lowe's and Home Depot.
The primary driver of retail in Canada is now American hedge and venture capitalism, which inherently harms consumers and employees. This is not going to make things better for anyone except the obscenely wealthy.
Home Hardware is a Canadian hardware store chain locally owned and operated by franchisees.
And the one at Parkway Mall on Ellesmere Road in Toronto, sells out-of-season candy for cheap, lol.
Liquidating its entire business would put more than 9,000 jobs at risk.
If nothing else you should feel something for the 9000 Canadians that will be out of a job.
Oh, I do.
You raise a good question: for those staff, in the department stores, in logistics, in HR, in technology, in management, in marketing, design, etc. — how likely are they to find new work? How many of those 9000 employees will face real hardship, and how many will find new work in the role they’re in now?
I don’t know the answers! Losing one’s job is always tough — financially, emotionally. I hope if their roles are cut they find good positions soon.
But for Hudson’s Bay, the business? Couldn’t care less
It would not surprise me at all to learn that cheeto had put some pressure on HBC's ownership to start this ball rolling. After all Trump has said he'd use economic pressure to annex Canada. Almost 10,000 people out of a job almost overnight would fit the bill.
The HBC History Foundation will continue to exist as a non-profit and all the HBC records have been held by the Manitoba Archives since the 70s, so the bit of heritage that actually matters is going to stay.
I feel bad that a US private equity firm bought them and is now just liquidating what they can so they can extract what little value is left and dump the company without even pension funds.
They're not dumping any leftovers because they didn't buy HBC for the stores ... they bought it because of all the land HBC owns.
I honestly thought they were already gone. Maybe that was just zellers? I vaguely recall some talk of the zellers of my childhood neighborhood becoming a Target but that fell through and its been a few things but now is a save on. I kinda miss zellers though. It was a go to for spending my allowance as a kid and to this day every other store just feels kinda like I've gone in a parallell universe and shouldn't be there.
Maybe Sears?
Hey, question for folks: Are the stores open today? Like right now? Or did they lock up when they announced this?