Canadian Tire just bought what was left of Hudson's Bay for $30,001,670. Look at the last four digits: 1670. That is the year a British king handed this company control of land bigger than India. This summer, it ended as a shelf of beach chairs.
The land was called Rupert's Land, and it was huge. About 3.9 million square kilometers, running from the Rocky Mountains all the way up to the Arctic. For its first 200 years, Hudson's Bay was a government as much as a store. It ran its own courts. It had the legal right to raise an army, and the only person it answered to was the king of England.
In 1870, it sold that entire territory to the brand-new country of Canada for £300,000, about $1.5 million back then. To this day, it is the biggest land deal in Canadian history. The company kept the cash and some of the best farmland, and went into the store business instead. Its first department store opened in 1881.
For the next hundred years, the Bay was just part of life in Canada. The kind of store your grandparents shopped at. As recently as 2018, it still pulled in $9.4 billion a year.
Then it started bleeding money. In its final year, ending January 2025, Hudson's Bay lost $329.7 million. It was down to its last $3.3 million in cash while owing more than $2 billion. Shoppers had moved online. The huge downtown stores sat half empty, and the debts just kept piling up. The banks stopped lending. In March 2025 it filed for protection from the people it owed, the step companies take right before they go under. On June 1, all 96 stores closed for good, and the more than 9,000 people who worked there lost their jobs. A company older than Canada was finished.
What is left is the shelf in that photo. Canadian Tire paid $30 million for the Hudson's Bay name and the famous green, red, yellow and indigo stripes, then put them on a small summer collection: canoes, beach chairs, a pickleball set, some striped blankets. So a company that once ran a chunk of a continent now lives as a display rack between the car parts and the camping gear. And the price it sold for, $30,001,670, quietly ends in the year it was born.
One day, you’re one of the biggest companies in Canada. Next thing you know, you’re reduced to a display rack inside Canadian Tire