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Hudson's Bay has become a mediocre seller of everything. One of many that just ignored Amazon as it rose. It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon

Hudson's Bay has become a mediocre seller of everything. One of many that just ignored Amazon as it rose. It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die.

tootie 6y ago
Hudson Bay actually had some foresight in buying some other brands (Saks, Gilt) and investing in ecomm but it hasn't really turned them around.
- koolba 6y ago
  They sold off Gilt over two years ago for a net loss (estimated at $150M): https://www.wsj.com/articles/gilt-groupe-sold-to-rival-rue-la-la-1528154398 https://www.wsj.com/articles/gilt-groupe-sold-to-rival-rue-l...
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Foresight, maybe. An idea of what to do with them once acquired? Debatable.
m00x 6y ago
They have a 30+ year old system that runs on DOS. It takes forever to buy anything. If you have a gift card, you should be prepared to wait 1h+ for them to figure it out. Prices are not at all competitive, their products are awful. They deserve to die. I bought a $220 sheet set there that the "expert" told me it fit larger beds and that would not shrink. I wash it from the box, and then when I try to put it on, the fitted sheet doesn't is like 2' from fitting. No refunds since I washed it. Complete BS.
- CamelCaseName 6y ago
  No comment on their tech, but in my opinion they have a few fantastic products. Specifically their mittens and blankets.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  We did a part of our wedding registry there 15 years ago and I was astounded to find they still had books and books of hand written stock information. A friend worked there in the early 2000s basically fixing Excel spreadsheets that functioned as their stock tracking. This was at a time when Amazon etc. was already killing it. Writing was on the wall. Too much inertia.
- 542458 6y ago
  I’ve had the same experience around gift cards, and was just baffled. Like, this isn’t a strange or uncommon operation, it shouldn’t take three employees to cypher it out! One other funny thing is if there are two promotions you want to combine, and an employee tells you they can’t be combined - just go to another cash. 50/50 odds the second one will let you do it! We had our wedding registry at HBC - some items we received three of while the website said nobody had purchased, others showed as purchased - by nobody? A strange experience all around.
- bregma 6y ago
  > They have a 30+ year old system that runs on DOS. Looks more like an AS/400 interface to me.
marcinzm 6y ago
Retailers didn't ignore Amazon, they were just very bad at technology since they were never technology driven companies. They spent decades fighting each other in a very low margin business and were optimized for that. Walmart did the best but that was through buying out other companies and even they didn't do great.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  They don't have to compete with Amazon on technology, they can instead offer better service, or a better curated selection of (actually fit-for-purpose) products, or better prices, or better discoverability. But some retailers seem determined to be worse than Amazon in everything, which is quite the feat. It probably is a result from being locked into a race to the bottom against other brick-and-mortar retailers, as you mentioned.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Without good technology you cannot achieve any of the things you mentioned better than Amazon without spending so much money (on humans, etc.) that you lose anyway. Amazon's technology gives them higher margins and thus they can use that money on things like lower prices, better service, etc. Their other technologies allow them to do recommendations and other automatically curated approaches without spending money on humans to maintain everything. edit: Seriously, retailers have something like 0.5-1.0% profit margin, it's abysmal, they don't have the leeway to compete with on anything that costs them more.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    This is a great point, but I think in 2020 the stakes are a lot higher for offering "better curated selection of products", "better discoverability", and "better service". The first two, for any retailer, really mean either being very very niche, to the point where inventory variety has been reduced to tractability, or it means being data-driven and predictive. And that probably means being tech-savvy.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  In the time between when Amazon became a clear threat and now, students have started university and gone on to IPOed billion dollar companies. At this point being bad at technology is just incompetence/laziness/refusal to invest.
joecool1029 6y ago
>It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die. The company best positioned to handle Amazon, Sears, was parted out and gutted by its chairman and CEO Eddie Lampert. Toys "R" Us had a working business model and were gutted by VC's. So I wouldn't say they were quietly laying down, they were actively raided for their accumulated wealth and this left them unable to compete. Best Buy is probably best example of a company that figured out how to pivot and survive. They basically turned into consumer electronics consultants that tell people what to buy to solve their problem (at a gigantic markup). Amazon.com can't compete with that model as it's not built for the consumer that doesn't know what they want/need to solve a problem (or are afraid of knockoffs).
- alexpotato 6y ago
  There was recently an article on HN [0] that really opened my eyes to just how well Best Buy has done with that model. This section in particular: > Based on their feedback, Joly (the new CEO): > - fixed broken systems, like an internal search engine that gave bad data about which products were in stock; > - restored a beloved employee discount program; and > - invested heavily into regular employee training. I would bet money that fixing the search engine cost in the order of <$100Ks of engineer time and led to $1M+ in revenue. That's why the whole argument of "well, the profit margins are tiny so that's why retailers are dying" doesn't hold water with me. Just like every company there are critical systems that are obviously broken and are relatively easy to fix but are not correctly prioritized. If they are prioritized, they tend to have ripple effects through the rest of the company. 0 - https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-buy-then-best-buy-did-something-completely-brilliant.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-...
  - kbar13 6y ago
    best buy has also greatly improved their selection in inventory. about 10 years ago when i was building a pc the best buy store by me in NJ would only have a couple options for RAM, hard drive, gpu, and they would generally be no-name or low end brands marked up. fast forward to this year and when one of my ram modules died, i was able to get the specific model i needed next day pickup in store, and their return policy is excellent. they also have basically been the exclusive seller of nvidia 3070/3080/3090's in the US. really impressed by their turnaround
bawolff 6y ago
I feel like hudson bay was already on a declining path even before amazon was a thing
refurb 6y ago
Hudson's Bay has been on a long slow decline for the past 2 decades. Although their flagship stores have held on reasonably well for a while, their non-flagship stores were damn near empty in the mid-2000's. It's a bit of a shame since for smaller town in Canada, the Bay is often an anchor store for a mall. There aren't great "department stores" left, so when the Bay goes away, smaller towns are going to be a bit stuck (outside of ordering online).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tootie 6y ago

Hudson Bay actually had some foresight in buying some other brands (Saks, Gilt) and investing in ecomm but it hasn't really turned them around.

koolba 6y ago
They sold off Gilt over two years ago for a net loss (estimated at $150M): https://www.wsj.com/articles/gilt-groupe-sold-to-rival-rue-la-la-1528154398 https://www.wsj.com/articles/gilt-groupe-sold-to-rival-rue-l...
andrew_ 6y ago
Foresight, maybe. An idea of what to do with them once acquired? Debatable.

m00x 6y ago

They have a 30+ year old system that runs on DOS. It takes forever to buy anything. If you have a gift card, you should be prepared to wait 1h+ for them to figure it out. Prices are not at all competitive, their products are awful. They deserve to die. I bought a $220 sheet set there that the "expert" told me it fit larger beds and that would not shrink. I wash it from the box, and then when I try to put it on, the fitted sheet doesn't is like 2' from fitting. No refunds since I washed it. Complete BS.

CamelCaseName 6y ago
No comment on their tech, but in my opinion they have a few fantastic products. Specifically their mittens and blankets.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
We did a part of our wedding registry there 15 years ago and I was astounded to find they still had books and books of hand written stock information. A friend worked there in the early 2000s basically fixing Excel spreadsheets that functioned as their stock tracking. This was at a time when Amazon etc. was already killing it. Writing was on the wall. Too much inertia.
542458 6y ago
I’ve had the same experience around gift cards, and was just baffled. Like, this isn’t a strange or uncommon operation, it shouldn’t take three employees to cypher it out! One other funny thing is if there are two promotions you want to combine, and an employee tells you they can’t be combined - just go to another cash. 50/50 odds the second one will let you do it! We had our wedding registry at HBC - some items we received three of while the website said nobody had purchased, others showed as purchased - by nobody? A strange experience all around.
bregma 6y ago
> They have a 30+ year old system that runs on DOS. Looks more like an AS/400 interface to me.

marcinzm 6y ago

Retailers didn't ignore Amazon, they were just very bad at technology since they were never technology driven companies. They spent decades fighting each other in a very low margin business and were optimized for that. Walmart did the best but that was through buying out other companies and even they didn't do great.

wongarsu 6y ago
They don't have to compete with Amazon on technology, they can instead offer better service, or a better curated selection of (actually fit-for-purpose) products, or better prices, or better discoverability. But some retailers seem determined to be worse than Amazon in everything, which is quite the feat. It probably is a result from being locked into a race to the bottom against other brick-and-mortar retailers, as you mentioned.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Without good technology you cannot achieve any of the things you mentioned better than Amazon without spending so much money (on humans, etc.) that you lose anyway. Amazon's technology gives them higher margins and thus they can use that money on things like lower prices, better service, etc. Their other technologies allow them to do recommendations and other automatically curated approaches without spending money on humans to maintain everything. edit: Seriously, retailers have something like 0.5-1.0% profit margin, it's abysmal, they don't have the leeway to compete with on anything that costs them more.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  This is a great point, but I think in 2020 the stakes are a lot higher for offering "better curated selection of products", "better discoverability", and "better service". The first two, for any retailer, really mean either being very very niche, to the point where inventory variety has been reduced to tractability, or it means being data-driven and predictive. And that probably means being tech-savvy.
MattGaiser 6y ago
In the time between when Amazon became a clear threat and now, students have started university and gone on to IPOed billion dollar companies. At this point being bad at technology is just incompetence/laziness/refusal to invest.

joecool1029 6y ago

>It is unbelievable to me how little challenge Amazon has faced as all their competitors just quietly lie down and die. The company best positioned to handle Amazon, Sears, was parted out and gutted by its chairman and CEO Eddie Lampert. Toys "R" Us had a working business model and were gutted by VC's. So I wouldn't say they were quietly laying down, they were actively raided for their accumulated wealth and this left them unable to compete. Best Buy is probably best example of a company that figured out how to pivot and survive. They basically turned into consumer electronics consultants that tell people what to buy to solve their problem (at a gigantic markup). Amazon.com can't compete with that model as it's not built for the consumer that doesn't know what they want/need to solve a problem (or are afraid of knockoffs).

alexpotato 6y ago
There was recently an article on HN [0] that really opened my eyes to just how well Best Buy has done with that model. This section in particular: > Based on their feedback, Joly (the new CEO): > - fixed broken systems, like an internal search engine that gave bad data about which products were in stock; > - restored a beloved employee discount program; and > - invested heavily into regular employee training. I would bet money that fixing the search engine cost in the order of <$100Ks of engineer time and led to $1M+ in revenue. That's why the whole argument of "well, the profit margins are tiny so that's why retailers are dying" doesn't hold water with me. Just like every company there are critical systems that are obviously broken and are relatively easy to fix but are not correctly prioritized. If they are prioritized, they tend to have ripple effects through the rest of the company. 0 - https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-buy-then-best-buy-did-something-completely-brilliant.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/amazon-almost-killed-best-...
- kbar13 6y ago
  best buy has also greatly improved their selection in inventory. about 10 years ago when i was building a pc the best buy store by me in NJ would only have a couple options for RAM, hard drive, gpu, and they would generally be no-name or low end brands marked up. fast forward to this year and when one of my ram modules died, i was able to get the specific model i needed next day pickup in store, and their return policy is excellent. they also have basically been the exclusive seller of nvidia 3070/3080/3090's in the US. really impressed by their turnaround

bawolff 6y ago

I feel like hudson bay was already on a declining path even before amazon was a thing

refurb 6y ago

Hudson's Bay has been on a long slow decline for the past 2 decades. Although their flagship stores have held on reasonably well for a while, their non-flagship stores were damn near empty in the mid-2000's. It's a bit of a shame since for smaller town in Canada, the Bay is often an anchor store for a mall. There aren't great "department stores" left, so when the Bay goes away, smaller towns are going to be a bit stuck (outside of ordering online).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]