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.
HBC has a dark history but in modern form, it could have also provided important competition to Amazon. Apologies are in order nonetheless.
Aside: it’s amazing how HBC, Sears, etc. had successful mail-order/catalog businesses before Amazon came along and built a mail-order system on the internet - and completely threw away their lead.
The PE firm should be required to liquidate assets in order to pay the severance owed to the employees. It is a moral failure of the government and society to allow them to get away without paying.
That’s the thing, the PE firm already sold the major assets (the real estate) to themselves and leased it back to HBC. It’s their standard playbook.
Exactly; the money is there but the PE leeches get to keep it all. “But bankruptcy” get the money or put the principals in prison, and work down the investor list.
The real modern competitor to Amazon could have been Consumers Distributing.
No, it couldn’t.
Hbc sold most of its real estate holdings by the 60s and 70s. It was already dead by the 80s when they couldn’t adapt to malls, it was even more dead in the 90s when it refused to ditch the “department store” approach.
By the time private equity got hold of it in 2008, there was almost nothing left.