Maybe a “buy Canadian” program will turn things around. Probably too late, by the looks of it.
Hudson’s Bay is still waiting to see if it will be granted approval to liquidate stores as the retailer requests more time to work out some of its differences with its myriad of landlords, lenders and other partners.
Despite requesting permission from the court to move forward with the liquidation, the company is holding out hopes it can avoid the merchandise sell-off by finding enough financing to keep it alive in some form.
The $23 million it has garnered so far is not enough and necessitates a full liquidation of the business, putting 9,364 jobs at risk…
It must be eight or ten years since I was in the local Hudson’s Bay store. Deserted, even back then. Prices were high. Chinese-made shirts were $60, if I recall correctly, and at Wal-Mart Chinese-made shirts were $12. A queen-size box spring and mattress was over $3000. At the Brick, similar quality was maybe a third of that.
HBC just didn’t try to compete, that’s all. Sears didn’t either, and it went under. I remember reading that the Sears board of directors instructed the executive management to study Wal-Mart and see what drew so many of the former Sears customers away. They didn’t, or at least, if they did, they did nothing about it. And customers stayed away.
It’s all just bad management. Sears went under because the newish CEO was even more incompetent than the old. Why is Jeff Bezos rich? Sears had the potential to be Amazon decades before Amazon, but they were too stupid to go from catalogue to online. Maybe they thought Paul Krugman wasn’t a complete moron (the internet is a fad guy)
Hudson’s Bay cited “Trump’s tariffs” as the cause of their demise …
https://www.retaildive.com/news/hudsons-bay-co-saks-bankruptcy-trump-tariffs/742009/
I am waiting for their detailed explanation of exactly how a tariff that hasn’t even been fully enacted has caused patrons to disappear from their stores? And how 2 months of a Trump Admin. somehow instantly drove them to bankruptcy? Sounds like they’re going broke because they’re operated by leftist excuse-makers … not people of competency, business sense, and action.
They’re owned by an American real estate developer who’s going to develop the real estate.
Do they actually own any of their real estate? Looks like 12 of the properties are split ownership between between RioCan REIT and The Bay, and the rest are rental properties from Cadillac Fairview and others.
All of the Landlords are going to take a bath, and have been providing loans to the Bay for many years.
A lot of their mall locations are as you’ve described them.
It’s their legacy, century old department store locations in downtown cores that can now be used for condos and office towers.
Hudson’s Bay is legacy merchanting. They simply couldn’t keep up with online sales. Sad, but they belong to a different era and never could adapt to the new reality. It’s got FA to do with Trump’s tarriffs.
At this point they might as well just go back to their core business and open a bunch of fur trading posts in the north.
Force me to wear a mask if I go shopping? Well, I’m not going shopping. All the big brains have completely destroyed all the good models of retail – Sears, K-Mart, Eaton’s, Simpson’s and now The Bay. Mock me if you want but people were pretty happy with these outlets. You blew it, not the consumers.
Billion dollar bailout on the way? In canada incompetency is handsomely rewarded, maybe if they promise to force their employees to vote for racist Liberals?
Sad but I went there after Christmas and scored some fantastic deals as the staff loaded discount on discount. Bought a winter coat list 249.00 by the time they were finished it was 60.00
Zellers, Canadian, gone. Eatons, Canadian, gone. Hudsons Bay, Canadian, gone.
ahhh but Walfart, American and Home Despot, American, which stayed open during covid are thriving!!! see !!! we *love* Americans who muscle us out of the retail market !!!
“In the year ended Jan. 31, Hudson Bay’s net loss was about CA$329.7 million, with EBITDA of roughly negative CA$67.9 million, according to another filing. As of then, its total net assets were worth about CA$3.7 billion and total liabilities were about CA$3.2 billion.”
I want the people pushing “Trumps Tariffs” to explain how Trump forced the Hudson Bay Co to go deep into debt, and have to borrow money from it’s Landlords since at least 2015?
Easy explanation for you JD.
President Trump had the Deputy leader of Diagolon,a fearsome terrorist organization,according to our Liberal Government.
Anyway I digress
The drug using,time travelling goat..Second in command of Diagolon, acting as Trump’s agent, went back in time to to bankrupt Hudson Bay and trigger the Recession.
Canadian retail has been devolving for decades. It reflects our diminishing standard of living.
Canadian Tire is the largest importer of chicom goods in the Canadian market. The rest of the market is Walmart, The Dollar Store and Goodwill. Not much to pick from.
Canadian Tire is the largest importer of chicom goods in the Canadian market.
Yup. About 40 years ago, one could go to a CT and buy just about anything that one needed to build a complete motor vehicle, except for, maybe, the chassis and body panels. And much of it was made in Canada.
Now? Most of those items are no longer on its shelves and whatever’s there is mainly chicom-made.
Back when CT was for grease monkeys and Radio Shack was for electronics nerds.
RS, of course, went out of business 20 years ago. The Source was RS’s successor in Canada and, much of the old RS inventory was basically repackaged and sold off. A few years ago, it became part of BestBuy.
The only reason I still go there once in a while is for batteries, such as the coin cells for my computers.
Like Nortel before them, I suspect that they were raped and gutted by upper-level management at worse, and utterly mismanaged at best.
It has very little if anything to do with competition from online retail platforms or tapped-out Canadians, as those would be hitting the entire retail sector, not just The Bay.
I started watching news about Northern Telecom in the early to mid-1980s. Even then, it became abundantly clear that it had a problem with its upper management. The decline truly began when Bell sold its holdings about 25 years ago and the share price began sliding.
Then came the frequent re-stating of its earnings figures, which is definitely not a good sign. By then, I no longer cared about NT as an investment and I wasn’t at all surprised when I heard that it had gone belly up, though that happened rather quietly.
During the 1980s, I had several interviews at various locations for NT. It was quite obvious that it had a corporate attitude that it was #1 and it could do no wrong. It seemed that people could spend money without worrying about accounting for it. (One of those interviews were because a bunch of snotty kids working at one facility saw my application and decided to call me in–just to see what I looked like, or so they told me.)
Pity, though. I have one of their 1980s design digital telephones. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware.
I used to have one of those Nortel “Solo” phones, but I don’t know what happened to it. I liked it a lot.
In the early 2000s, I was part of an office furniture installation crew permanently stationed at a big Nortel campus, to re-configure their fancy Steelcase furniture system as projects were implemented and dissolved. I asked an employee for a pen once, he gave me box of 12 $10 pens. They had an executive office area with a fair sized humidor cabinet full of fancy cigars and a liquor cabinet with stuff like JW Blue Label and Louis XIV cognac.
My NT phone is a grey Harmony.
There’s lots of leftover NT hardware available on eBay and Kijiji at fairly low prices. I guess that was because so many of them were made. Compare that with the original brick cellular phones. I’ve seen some fetching prices of around $1000 because those definitely are collector’s items.
I’m not surprised at what you described. It was that high-and-mighty attitude that got NT into trouble. Whatever filching the chicoms may have engaged in was as a result of that, not the cause.
As I read the financial news about the company over the years, I kept wondering just when NT would finally run aground and sink. For one thing, it got involved in stuff that it had no business considering. More than 40 years ago, it opened a fibre optic cable plant in Saskatoon. That didn’t last very long and the facility was eventually sold to Dow Corning, which closed it roughly 15 years after taking over the place.
In the mid-1980s, I worked for a certain company in southern Alberta. One day, an NT rep showed up, gave us a song-and-dance spiel about its quality control services and suggesting that we farm out our QC work to them. Never mind that we actually had a shop for that as one part of the firm was mass-producing components for the products it sold and, therefore, had a good idea of what worked.
It was stuff like that that helped NT go under.
my understanding nortel went kaputz partly because chinese moles stole their designs and thence their market. its been a while, forgot the details.
That’s the story that’s been circulated but I remain unconvinced. As I mentioned earlier, the financial news about NT that I read showed that things weren’t promising with the company.
I don’t recall the reason why Bell sold its holdings, but it had been a major shareholder for years. When something like that happens, it’s probably a bad sign. It makes one wonder if there’s something going on that the general public doesn’t know about.
When Bell dumped its shares in the late 1990s, NT was trading at around $120/share. In the coming months, investors started heading for the exits, and the price declined. It squirmed for about another 10 years before going belly up.
NT’s demise had a lot to do with John Roth’s reckless acquisition spree trying to beat out Cisco around 1997 to 1999. When the Internet bubble burst in 2000 so did the company. It was great fun working with lots of very tech smart people in Ottawa from BNR roots but after the implosion there were tough times. One guy for a while was stocking grocery store shelves to feed his family of five.
Is Canada the next Hudson’s Bay or Nortel?
Now where am I going to get wildly overpriced wool blankets?
When The Bay’s sale price is the same as other retailer’s regular price, you stop shopping at The Bay.
The only reason you look for The Bay is when you are at the mall “Remember, we parked outside The Bay”.