Beye Escobar was both delighted and disappointed as she emerged from the sprawling Hudson’s Bay Company store in downtown Ottawa with two new bikinis.
While she was pleased that her swimwear had been discounted by 70 percent, she was not happy about the reason. 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.
“I honestly don’t know why it’s closing, but I think it’s very unfortunate because they had very good stuff,” Ms. Escobar said while waiting for her husband to emerge last Wednesday from the store, where once-stylish display windows were plastered with black, yellow and red “Entire Store On Sale!” signs.
“I don’t know where I’ll go now,” she added.
The Bay’s fate was sealed by the large debt it had been carrying, and it recently declared bankruptcy.
Long before 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Baker invested heavily in the Bay’s e-commerce. And part of Ms. Brooks’s revitalization 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.” The blankets were first used in the 18th century to trade for furs with Indigenous people.
“It felt like a piece of Canada,” said Bryan Higgins, who was headed to the Ottawa store last Wednesday for a farewell visit. “It felt like going to Tim Hortons” — another Canadian institution — “and getting a doughnut, except you were buying blankets or slippers. It was uniquely Canadian.”
Mr. Higgins rattled off a long list of store closings in Canada, starting with Eatons and Sears Canada and the recent, and relatively brief, appearances of Target and Nordstrom.
But, he added, “the Bay had a niche, it had a market. Where are people going to get their fine clothes and their unique linens?”
“Unfortunately everyone’s buying online now,” he said.
While Jesse Wong, who was visiting her son in Ottawa from Calgary, Alberta, also lamented the Bay’s demise, she was eagerly making the most of the liquidation sale, coming out of the store laden with bags. It was her fourth trip, and she hoped to get more in before returning home.
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.
But Ms. Wong said that she kept returning because each day brought new deliveries of potential treasures.
Mid-last week, the most popular of those new offerings seemed to be indoor-outdoor rugs marked down by 90 percent. A steady stream of shoppers walked out struggling to haul them away.
Ashley Johnson was accompanied by a friend who had two rugs thrust into a stroller with her son. Ms. Johnson’s purchase, a throw, covered the top of her own stroller.
While pleased with her bargain, Ms. Johnson was not a fan of Hudson’s Bay.
“It’s way too expensive,” she said. “The only thing I came here for was perfume — that’s pretty much the same price everywhere. I’m not going to miss it.”
Mr. Baker’s focus shifted away from the Bay as he bought other department stores, notably Saks Fifth Avenue, in the United States and Europe. After buying Neiman Marcus last year, Mr. Baker severed Hudson’s Bay from the rest of his holdings.
The company filed for bankruptcy in March, but its decline had begun well before and accelerated after the pandemic.
A lack of maintenance and investment in the stores was tangible to customers encountering broken elevators and escalators as they tried to reach the top of the Ottawa store. A fire escape stairwell was opened to make going up and down easier. (On the top floor, an undated sign promised the escalators would be fixed within 90 days.)
Last week, reaching the top was a letdown. What had been expansive kitchen, furniture and linens departments was now mostly a sea of empty shelves. One area, that long ago housed a restaurant, was filled with impossibly big Christmas wreaths, cardboard Christmas trees and other decorations the store displayed during the holidays.
A bulletin board lying on a table hinted at the store’s former glory. A “store inventory snapshot” pinned on it showed that the downtown Ottawa store sold 31 million Canadian dollars, $22.5 million at current exchange rates, worth of merchandise in 2019.
After the final cleanup of the stores, Hudson’s Bay said in bankruptcy filings that it planned to lay off about 8,200 employees without severance pay.
Despite that, workers were diligently cleaning the handrails of the still-working escalators and sweeping up bits of boxes torn apart by frenzied bargain seekers. Citing company policy, no employee or manager in the store agreed to be interviewed, though some volunteered that they had worked there for decades.
The Hudson’s Bay’s name (in full: the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay) and all of the company’s other intellectual properties were sold in bankruptcy to Canadian Tire, another large retailer that said it had no plans to revive the Bay department stores.
A relatively small commercial real estate company in British Columbia won the rights to 28 Hudson’s Bay store leases and has a vague plan to start a new department store chain. But those takeovers still need the approval of landlords and a judge.
For all of the nostalgia Hudson’s Bay evokes among many Canadians, it has a different resonance with many Indigenous people given the company’s involvement in the colonization of Canada by Europeans. They argue that the company was built on the exploitation of their lands and that the Indigenous trappers who were key to its early prosperity were never fairly compensated.
As she left with her daughter who had bought a dressmaker’s form, Geneviève Cloutier said that history left her ambivalent about Hudson’s Bay.
“I had a love-hate relationship with the store,” she said. “I’d see a Bay blanket, and I’d think: Oh, it’s such Canadiana. But it comes with the shame of all of the colonial violence — the dark side of the Bay.”
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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