down by the bay

I was lamenting the latest stage of the long, slow collapse of Hudsons Bay Company, once a literal icon of the Canadian retail landscape.

The very history of this country is tangled up in the complex colonialist role played by this company in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and if for no other reason than that I’m sure there are justified cheers at the karmic collapse of this once epic company. Still, the collapse of the modern Hudsons Bay retail enterprise is nothing to celebrate, what with the scope and variety of employment it offered in many communities, its status as a signature anchor tenant in many shopping centres, and too, as one of the last historic holdouts against the dominance of Amazon and such. 

I could probably write for pages on this complex role it played in communities, its decline and now complete disappearance from many cities, including my own. But instead, I woke up in the middle of the night and was tossing and turning in bed thinking about—I kid you not—the customer experience at The Bay.

Maybe it was tradition. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was stubbornness. But the experience at that store never seemed to adapt to the modern retail world. From the ancient point of sale systems to an online experience that, on the three occasions I made use of it, revealed the reason Amazon holds a place of utter dominance in this domain. It was slow and cumbersome, like so much at The Bay. 

But my strangest late night insight was in an unfair comparison to Ikea.

We all laugh at the maze-like design of the furniture retailer, but the truth is the user experience in that store does two things very well. First, it gives the customer a little mini-adventure upon each visit. There are shortcuts, true, but I suspect many or even most shoppers walk the Ikea mile dutifully. Second, the maze walks you past virtually every product the store sells. The net result of this is that I, even mediocre consumer that I am, rarely leave without at least one purchase.

The only thing that The Bay ever coerced any customer to walk past was the fragrance department, and the only adventure I got from that was testing my ability to hold my breath.

I have no great insight upon this sad and seeming final chapter of a once-proud Canadian retailer, at least nothing that countless other online commentators haven’t already written on, save for maybe that even corporations get old and senile. And maybe that’s the lesson we should take from it, that everything has a time and place, and we should remember fondly the good times rather than shaking our heads at some analysis of a business failure, and rather accept that nature and the passage of time can take its toll on most anything.