The oldest company of North America, the Hudson’s Bay Company or HBC, was incorporated in 1670 as a fur trading business and still operates to this day as a department store. Since 2013, HBC has acquired Saks, Inc. and the German department store Galeria Kaufhof. The Hudson’s Bay Company experienced significant increases in revenue to 2016, when sales peaked at 14.46 billion Canadian dollars. Revenues have, however, taken a downward turn since then - in 2018 their revenue amounted to around 9.38 billion Canadian dollars.
On average, Canadian shopping malls generate more sales per square foot than malls in the United States. The highest earning mall per square foot, the Yorkdale Shopping Center in Toronto, Ontario, generated about 1,900 Canadian dollars per square foot in 2018. In the same year, the Yorkdale Shopping Center had the second highest share of foreign owned apparel chains of any large mall in Canada. With the exception of Alberta, every Canadian province reported positive year-on-year sales growth of shopping malls as of March 2017.
Department stores are popular shopping locations in Canada, and this shows no sign of changing in the near future. The most common reasons consumers in Canada enjoy shopping at department stores are because of the brands they carry and the wide variety of goods they offer.
