Reality setting in for workers who thought Hudson's Bay would never close

From concerns about losing their homes to regrets about not accepting a previous severance offer that could have potentially paid them three times as much money, there were “a lot of tears” among some of Hudson’s Bay Co. ULC’s roughly 9,000 employees this week as Canada’s oldest departmental store started liquidating its outlets on Monday.

HBC’s constant financial struggles meant the “writing was on the wall,” Jody Nesbit, president of Union Local 240, which represents about 60 Bay employees, said.

However, workers were hopeful the company, founded in 1670, would turn things around. But those hopes were dashed on Friday when a court allowed it to start liquidating 90 of its 96 stores.

“They (the employees) didn’t ever think that the Hudson Bay Company would be gone from Canada,” Nesbit said. “It really took people by surprise.”

HBC went to court on March 7 to get an order that would protect it from its creditors as it struggled to pay its dues to landlords, vendors and service providers. It took the step after a landlord locked it out of a store in Sydney, N.S., and a team of bailiffs attempted to seize merchandise from a store in Toronto’s Sherway Gardens mall.

The move was supposed to provide the company, which struggled to cope with the shift towards online shopping, with “breathing room” as it looked for financing. That plan, however, didn’t work out, as trade tensions between the United States and Canada pushed potential financiers to the sidelines, it said.

Nesbit said that reality is “slowly setting in” for the employees, many of whom have worked at the Bay for almost all their working lives, including one person from her union who was there for 38 years.

She said some of those who declined a $25,000 severance