Canada 355 Year-old Company Shutting Down

On Sunday, a month after it marked the 355th anniversary of its founding, the Bay, as it is commonly known, is permanently closing its 80 department stores throughout Canada.
The company was much more than just a retailer and the last traditional, full-line department store chain in Canada. In 1670, Britain, which claimed part of present-day Canada, set up the company as a fur trader and granted it a vast stretch of territory equal to what is about a third of Canada, without asking the indigenous people whose land it was.

Long before US President Trump’s trade war and his calls to make Canada the 51st state stoked anti-American sentiment in Canada, the purchase in 2008 of a cultural institution like the Bay by Richard A Baker, a New Yorker whose family controlled an array of shopping malls, was widely viewed with suspicion among Canadians.

At first, Baker made good on his promise that he had not bought the Bay for its real estate — although he did cash in on that later. His investments in the stores and his appointment of Bonnie Brooks, a respected Canadian retailer, as president and chief executive turned Hudson’s Bay sagging fortunes around.

To compete with the rise of online retailing, Baker invested heavily in the Bay’s e-commerce.
And part of Brooks’s revitalisation involved playing up the company’s heritage. Merchandise, from measuring cups to wooden canoes, started appearing bearing the distinctive green, red, yellow and indigo stripes of the Bay’s “point blankets.”

Many parts of the five-story store were already empty or filled with small armies of mannequins, boxes of clothes hangers and store fixtures of every imaginable variety — all for sale. Mid-last week, the most popular of those new offerings seemed to be indoor-outdoor rugs marked down by 90 per cent. A steady stream of shoppers walked out struggling to haul them away.