Hudson's Bay Company Needs Our Help

When I was a little boy, the ‘point blanket’ section of Hudson’s Bay made an impression on me. I understood they represented an important link to the past of my country, and I felt a certain pride and respect for these items of quality manufacture.

A few years ago, for my birthday, my parents generously offered me one of these traditional woolen blankets. It has become one of my most used and appreciated household possessions. It was worth the wait, and that special feeling of deference and pride is still with me when I walk through the Stripes department at The Bay today.

The same cannot be said, however, for the rest of the floorspace.

An inevitable decline?

Like others, I have been saddened at the decline of the Hudson’s Bay Company as a retailer over the last six or seven years. Back in 2018, I made a point of visiting the Vancouver and Victoria stores while on a trip out West. It was not surprising to see those stores in the same condition as the one closest to me, on Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal.

It’s been incredibly difficult to see Hudson’s Bay go downhill, but is this just the inevitable decline of the department store? After all, we’ve already lost Simpsons, Eaton and Sears, haven’t we?

To be fair, other department store retailers are also struggling south of the border and overseas, but few of them are blessed with the spectacular real estate Hudson's Bay has. It is here that an opportunity exists for a true renaissance of the organization.

Department store as destination

Many people will have heard of Harrods, the famous department store of London, or Selfridges, in the same city. Others with a more continental bent will know of Au Bon Marché or Les Galeries Lafayette in Paris. If one is in the habit of international travel, however, one quickly notices that all major countries have department stores rivaling these venerable institutions. One thinks of Kaufhaus des Westens (KDW) in Berlin, Il Corté Inglès in Madrid and Lisbon, or any of a handful of spectacular department store chains in Japan, such as Takashimaya, Sogo, or Mitsukoshi.

Any of these could be could be taken as an exemplar of its kind. These are astounding places. Abundant with luxury goods of all kinds, hard-to-find clothing, plentiful jewelry and cosmetics, and more prosaic items for everyday use, each department is a wunderkammer of the best the world has to offer.?

Typically, these grand commercial spaces rise up over several floors, each more impressive than the last and, without exception, offer some of the best local and international food and drink on their top floors - a foodie’s dream fantasy version a food court - if you can afford it.

Into this international cornucopia of retail sophistication, Canada proffers the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) department store as its only still-viable home-grown contender. But stepping into a Hudson’s Bay store today feels like walking into a discount store. Entering into the promise suggested by the elegant facades of what are some of the most beautiful buildings in Canada’s major cities, one is greeted in the interior, rather jarringly, by brightly painted white walls and discount-yellow signs offering huge discounts off mostly forgettable clothing and household goods.?A somewhat perplexing experience this must be for an international visitor enjoying an afternoon of shopping in Canada.

The Stripes department is the one gracious exception to this. But its sheen, iconic as it is, cannot by itself be expected to rub off on that huge expanse of floorspace.

Another tragedy in the making

This is becoming embarrassing. A management dealt a hand including some of the world’s best retail floorspace, a company history stretching back five centuries, the goodwill of the Canadian public, and the positive associations of Canada internationally with quality, ruggedness and authenticity, could for a long time find nothing better to do than implement a real-estate sell-and-lease-back scheme. All this while the actual business operations descend into a vicious circle of cost-cutting and declining sales.

I was somewhat heartened by recent announcements and news. It appears that the sale-and-lease-back scheme has been deemphasized in favour of long-term value creation (but not before tragically divesting flagship properties in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver). Further, the potential deal announced over the summer is clearly a step in the right direction.?

Of course, there was other news during the summer, about HVAC systems and escalators being turned off from lack of adequate maintenance budgets, or even entire stores closing because the AC didn’t work. There were also rumoured furloughs to reduce personnel costs, and now rumours of more layoffs. The layoffs are an especially bad sign.

Royalmount as department store

Now it just so happens that the other day, I had the chance to visit the new Royalmount shopping centre in Montreal. I am not necessarily a fan of luxury for luxury’s sake, but it is possible to construe it as a very big, very kitschy sort of “department store”, with all the different “departments” (stores) and a fancy food court.

Continuing with the analogy, the luxury area of the Royalmount, with the Swarovski, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and others, would correspond to the stores-within-a-store typically found on the ground floors of those grand department stores. The other areas of this new shopping centre would correspond to the 2nd to 6th or 7th floors, and the food court to the topmost one or two floors.

What's next?

So clearly someone in Canada understands these things. My question for the industry would be, why doesn’t the management at HBC understand these things? Why, given such a strong hand to play, can they only offer discounts, sales, and polyester rehashes of past glories?

Running another great Canadian company into the ground would be a failure not just for HBC, but for all of Canadian enterprise. Any of us who have the capacity to act should do so - thinking creatively and with both local and international know-how in mind. How can we save this rare remaining example of the original Canadian greats?

We have lost Simpsons, Eaton, Nortel Networks, BlackBerry, most of Bombardier.

Enough is enough. We can and must do better.