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. As of 2016, it was the ninth leading department store company worldwide, with about 11 billion U.S. dollars in sales. The Hudson’s Bay Company has experienced significant increases in revenue since 2012, growing from 4.08 billion Canadian dollars in that year to around 14.4 billion Canadian dollars in 2017.
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 1,600 Canadian dollars per square foot in 2017. The Yorkdale Shopping Center also had the 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. Surveys of Walmart and HBC shoppers in Canada in May 2016 found that the vast majority of their customers were either somewhat satisfied or very satisfied with their shopping experience
