Canadian department stores used to sparkle – now they fade away
I touched down in Toronto this week to meet some clients, scope out some potential business, do a little retail tour, say hello to my new colleague, Sally, at our College Street outpost and watch Prime Minister Mark Carney squeak his budget through parliament. On Wednesday, over drinks at a heaving Ritz-Carlton, I also met with a gentleman hailing from Winnipeg – the city of my birth. I no longer have much connection to the city, so it was like meeting a centuries-ago trader from the Hudson’s Bay Company (more on this in a moment) after his return from years trapping and trading in the Canadian wilderness.
I wanted to know everything about the city and how it was developing. Had they managed to sort out the Downtown core? Where were the interesting pockets for better dining and shopping? What was the best hotel in the city? And where did he see opportunities? While the gentleman was damning in his assessment of Winnipeg’s Downtown, he was nevertheless hopeful that new initiatives and a group of passionate, patriotic locals were going to turn things around. As the conversation carried on and the hotel bar filled with more Torontonians in search of very early Christmas cheer, it turned out that I, too, was being recruited to be part of Winnipeg’s turnaround.
As he discussed new developments on the horizon and the success of the city’s arena, my mind drifted to those early years in Winnipeg, when the city boasted a functioning and vibrant Downtown, three department stores on Portage Avenue and not a single vacant storefront along its main shopping strip. The Winnipeg of my childhood was a gateway to western Canada, a transit hub for grain and minerals bound for distant shores via Thunder Bay and even had its own ballet with a royal appointment. On Saturdays, I would go Downtown with my parents to visit the fashion and furniture floors of Eaton’s and The Bay (the retail brand of the Hudson’s Bay Company for several decades), plus a spin through Holt Renfrew for fancier gear.
At this time of year, department store windows were filled with elaborate Christmas displays and I would jostle with other children to catch a glimpse of what Eaton’s visual merchandising team had created for passing traffic. Inside, I would make my way to the toy department and, for a couple of years, pay a visit to Santa. Eaton’s always had the best Christmas catalogue and I would flip back and forth across the pages looking at new trucks, tanks, planes, Playmobil police sets and scale-model collections of naval ships and armoured vehicles. Down the street, The Bay was housed in a more impressive building and was every bit what one would expect from a big-city department store in the early 1970s. There was a well staffed information desk, a buzzy cosmetics and fragrance hall and across its multiple floors The Bay could look after pretty much all household needs – from fur storage and full dining sets to the latest looks from New York and London. Paris, in most stores, was a bit of a stretch.
Earlier this year the Hudson’s Bay Company went bankrupt after more than 350 years of business. Like so many North American department stores it shifted strategies on multiple occasions, went through endless management changes, ventured into markets where it didn’t belong and drifted away from its core of being a solid retailer for Canada’s middle classes. Today, Canada’s downtowns and malls are marked by scores of Hudson’s Bay shops that are permanently shuttered and the nation is poorer for it both economically and culturally.
This week, Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House put some of the store’s art collection on the block, including fine pieces of Canada’s history that traded hands for quite reasonable prices. I grew up in a Canada that had about 10 national and regional department stores (Woodward’s, Ogilvy’s, Simpsons and more). Today there are two – Holt Renfrew and Simons. I walked past an empty Hudson’s Bay store at Yorkdale Mall (one of the most successful shopping centres in North America) and had to wonder whether, in the right hands, it could have turned itself around and made a case not just for the relevance of department stores in today’s retail landscape but for a thoroughly more pleasant and modern way to consume – and not only during the run-up to Christmas.
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