Hudson’s Bay Company, Canada’s oldest retailer, didn’t die of natural causes — it was gutted by private equity. Stripped of assets and loaded with debt, it leaves behind job losses, endangered pensions, and a hollowed-out legacy reduced to branding rights.
  • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    22·
    24 days ago

    Private equity lies at the heart of the Bay’s collapse. In 2008, US-based NRDC Equity Partners bought the Bay just as brick-and-mortar retailers began to reckon with the rise of e-commerce. Today the Bay is blaming the pandemic, the US-Canada trade war, and a broader decrease in department store traffic for its decline — but sharper eyes see through the excuses. Before the closure, and after the Bay’s private equity capture, experts were noting a “lack of investment” in the retail stores themselves. One professor went so far as to call the Bay’s purchase by NRDC “the point at which the company began its slow death.”

    Private equity is capitalism’s version of a serial killer. Governments should be regulating it but they won’t since too many politicians have been bought out.