The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben dissects the collapse of the Hudson's Bay Company. How a storied institution failed to adapt to the times

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Guests and Topics: -How did one of Canada's most storied institutions fail to adapt with the times with Guest: Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters, Founder of Chatter AI -What Happens after a Death on Campus with Guest: Jadine Ngan, Writer and Editor -What Happens after a Death on Campus with Guest: Tahmeed Shafiq, Investigative journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share, so expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. A lot of people believe that the liberal brand has been saved because of the election of Mark Carney as their new leader, but we as citizens of the world interact with dozens if not hundreds of brands on a daily basis, and here to discuss some of the world interact with dozens, if not hundreds of brands on a daily basis and here to discuss some of the most iconic ones and the stories around them is our good friend Tony Chapman. And Tony Chapman is the host of the award winning podcast Chatter That Matters, as well

as the founder of Chatter AI. Tony, welcome to the show. Ben, always a pleasure to be with you. Hudson's Bay, it is a historic company. It's been around longer than Canada by a country mile. And it is currently looking at closing about half of its 80 stores in a restructuring plan. How did they miss the mark? How did they fall so far behind in sort of adoption of a digital strategy that would have allowed bricks and mortar to survive in this new world?

That's a great question. A little personal history. I used to work at the Bay when I was in university selling suits. And on Bay Day, there would literally be hundreds of people lining up to get in because that once a year sale mattered. What happened is the department stores used to own the high street because they delivered two of the most important things when it comes to retail, convenience and location. They had everything under one roof. And then the suburbs happened with the advent of the car and the highways. And next thing you know, commercial real estate were giving department stores free space. If you had a Simpsons on one side and a Bay at the other side, and as people walk between those two great department stores,

they could rent out the boutiques for a fortune. So what happened? Convenience and location became in the palm of your hand with Amazon. They put the world with an arms race of desire. Specialty stores said, yeah, it's good that they have a few mattresses, but we're gonna have every mattress,

and we're also gonna have people on the floor that know about mattresses So they lost out in terms of any expertise and they never reinvented in the self as much as they tried to go digital When you're a start-off as a pure play bricks and mortar store It's very difficult to make yourself obsolete by being a pure play digital store That's something the department stores have yet to figure out and I'm not sure they ever will. But you and I have talked about it. It's not just about, it's not about making yourself obsolete. It's about, as somebody once said to me, participating in your own cannibalization, recognizing that things are going in one way. So

you're gonna hedge and you are going to invest in something that, yes, may take some of the foot traffic out of your company, but you're gonna more than make up for it in sort of your digital revenue. Yeah, and it's absolutely the right strategy until private equity comes along, buys you, and starts looking, saying, how do we get the biggest and fastest return? Let's sell our best real estate.

Let's sell some of our top assets. Let's start trying to cobble together all these different brands under one roof that make no sense to a consumer. And this is what you see happens and very often it's this app. You look at private equity and retail time and time again, you're seeing major retailers go out of business because the people that built that brand, the people that believed in that brand have no longer any interest in the brand. And that's what happens. Passion disappears, profit takes over and before long you've squeezed the goose to the point where they lay no

more eggs. Let's switch our focus to meta and you know years ago Facebook was where all the young kids were, now this is where all the angry uncles are, but Facebook marketplace somehow has managed to supplant Kijiji and Craigslist for a big share of that market and it's keeping a lot of young people on the platform. How do they do that? It's a great thing. Ten years ago, 70% of youth was on Facebook.

Now it's 30%. You can't see a faster downward spiral in a brand that used to stand for something, but they need the data. They need youth. They need the eyeballs. And so when they put up marketplaces, said, we're not going to charge you for it. Next thing you know, people flocked because we're all treasure hunters, we're all bargain hunters, and they get the data. And that data they can monetize in so many different ways and include the cross referencing what you're doing on

marketplace in terms of what you're doing on Instagram and WhatsApp to the other platforms they own. So make no mistake, data is the new oil. The barons are the people that own the data, and all marketplaces is another way to understand how you think, how you feel, and most importantly, how you shop. Marketing stunts are exactly that, but sometimes a stunt goes big, right?

When that guy walked across Niagara Falls, everybody was paying attention. But by and large, you can fall flat on your face. But Moosehead Breweries came out with what they're calling the presidential pack of 1,461 cans of Canadian lager, which is the equivalent of one can of beer for every day of the next four years of the Donald Trump presidential term.

I have no idea if it's going to be successful, but in my humble opinion, this should be a marketing home run. I think so. I mean, listen, you could run a ride a moose down Main Street and nobody would pay attention and nobody really connect you to Moosehead, but what Moosehead has done and what smart marketers realize is I'm going to feed into where the attention's going. And right now the tension is all about Donald Trump and what's he going to do next. So for Moosehead to come in with this pack is brilliant to use it in terms of a, you know, a

case of beer that, that big. Yeah. And what it gets is we're talking about a brand we haven't talked about in a very long time. And next thing you know, when you're an LCBO or the beer store, your convenience store, and you see Moosehead, you're going to go, oh yeah, maybe I'll give them a try again. Not to me, smart marketing. I mean, but with something like this, I haven't seen any commercials for it,

but I could absolutely see a really funny marketing campaign behind something like this. They should take it to influencers and deliver cases of Moosehead to people that are going to absolutely talk about it. They should have had a pallet parked in your radio station today because of the size of your podcast audience. That's what they should be doing. Television commercials isn't the way to do it. The way to do it is having people personify it

and talk about it in the media and on radio and with humor and just saying how brilliant this is. That's how you want moose head to be talked about. Cause are you going to talk about the taste of moose head over any other lager? No, it doesn't exist. Yeah. But you are going to talk about the taste of moose head over any other lager? No, doesn't exist. But you are going to talk about the brand saying, you know what, I'm part of the conversation.

Therefore, this might be a beer you want to drink because when you're drinking beer, guess what? It's a social lubricant. You're also part of the conversation. People of a certain age remember that a time where you could get pizza at McDonald's. The McPizza came and went. It had a moment and it was gone.

A lot of people miss it. And someone know, someone pointed out that like Tim Hortons is now in the pizza game, for better or worse. Some people think it's not pizza. But there was a time where McDonald's was the number one purveyor of pizza in Canada because of the McPizza. And it's gone. And I often wonder as a brand, what what did you think of that moment in time? And why do you think they never brought it back? A lot of capital was involved in bringing in those pizza ovens and the franchisees went along reluctantly. And then they realized it takes 12 minutes to serve a pizza. McDonald's is all about seconds. How fast do I get you through a

drive-through? How fast do I get you through a restaurant? So it was operationally not a smart move on McDonald's point. Marketing was great. Hamburgers, the favorite snack food in the world, bar none. Pizza's number two. And pizza, mom's love because you can serve as a Trojan horse for putting vegetables on. Kids don't like. And so, but what they didn't realize is yeah, but the thing that matters most to McDonald's consumers is I want to be in and out of there in seconds, not 12 minutes. 12 minutes is a lifetime for a McDonald's consumer. Well, also, I remember when last year when they surprised everybody with the new edition of the Spicy Chicken Nuggets, they said, oh, there was a big guessing game online. What was coming? What was coming?

And my brother was the one who said to me, my brother Mark it's gonna be it's gonna be spicy chicken nuggets because it doesn't require any new machines and because I was like maybe maybe it'll be a hot dog he's like if it's a hot dog then they have to they got to figure out a way to cook hot dogs whereas they already know how to cook nuggets so it's just gonna be a different flavored nugget and he was absolutely right without question and not only just the machine, think about the training involved. You've got part-time people that are coming in frequently, lots of churn.

You have to have an operation that's so simple to understand that the second day you're there, you can work the French fry fryer. And so when you bring in something new and complicated to the system, you're bringing, you're throwing a wrench into the gears and McDonald's, it stands for quality, value,

cleanliness and service. It doesn't stand for delicious, nutritious food. It stands for four things that people have value, and on top of all that, affordability. Sadly, right now it stands for food that's more expensive than it's worth, and I want to get back to a time where it's not a premium product anymore. It breaks my heart when I see how much 20 nuggets cost these days. Listen, the restaurant business is the toughest business around. Inflation is roaring in every part of the supply chain, including labor, food, transportation, and taxation, and you're dealing at a time where discretionary income is falling.

Tough place to be, and you have no choice but to raise prices to make a profit. Every time you do that, you know you're abandoning the people that used to trust you for the dollar menu and the $2 menu. Hey, Tony Chapman, always love our chats. Thank you so much. Have a great week. Always a pleasure, my friend. Chat soon. This is The Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. I am an old man. I just turned 49. And I remember when I was in college that there was this sort of running gag that a lot of people of my age will appreciate what I'm saying

because we've all heard some version of this. That if you were ever in college back in the day and your roommate died by suicide, that you would get straight A's for the rest of the semester. That was the thing, right? And it wasn't to make light of suicide, it was just what people said. I don't know if it was ever true,

but I think there was even movies about that, like college comedies about that. The world we are living in today is not that world. And we are living in a mental health crisis. And we are living in a time where mental health issues, specifically for children and kids and adolescents and people in university is spiking to crisis levels. And we are living in a time where universities,

it is incumbent upon them to have resources to help those in crisis. And for those who fall through the cracks and who ultimately die by suicide, it is incumbent on the universities to have protocols in place to help those who have been hurt by that crisis. That is not necessarily happening.

And it is highlighted in a tremendous piece in the Walrus called What Happens After a Death on Campus? And the two authors join us now, J.D. Nyang and Tamid Shafik. Welcome to both of you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having us. And like I said, I wasn't trying to make light of a crisis,

but that was sort of the world that I lived in a few decades ago. I was gonna say a few years ago, but decades ago. That is not the world that I lived in a few decades ago. I was gonna say a few years ago, but decades ago. That is not the world we're living in right now. Tamid, why don't you tell us about what university campuses are like today with the backdrop of this mental health crisis? Well, like you said, Ben, we're living through a time

when young people are experiencing really distressingly high rates of mental illness and mental anguish, and a lot of that is manifesting on university campuses. We have seen that over the past couple of years, particularly during the COVID pandemic, rates of on-campus mental health services really skyrocketed. Things like counseling services and referrals for therapists and all of this like predates COVID by decades. As part of our research, we took a really long view at the state of students dying by suicide on Canadian plus secondary campuses.

And you can find reliable media reports referring to this as like a widespread under reported problem going all the way back to the 2000s. Wow. This is a Jadine in the piece. I mean, you specifically recount issues on the University of Toronto campus in 2019. As sort of an example, to lead off the column, can you can you tell our listeners about that moment in time? Yes, of course. So in 2019, I was a second year student at the University of Toronto. And it was well known at the time that students were dying by suicide on campus, because some of these deaths were happening in pretty prominent places. It was hard to ignore. And I remember

at the time that students who were trying to access support services were being met with very long wait lists. And there was a lot of student advocacy to get that change because, you know, people would call in and they would be in immediate need. And they would be told that they couldn't be seen for a few weeks. And in the high stress environment of universities today, that can be a really devastating thing to hear. So it was a really heavy time for sure. Yeah, and to me, you know, I don't think anybody would go so far as to say that the university is solely responsible for the mental health of a student.

But if I were a parent sending my child to university, I would send them there fully expecting that my child would be returned to me four years later. And therefore, I believe it should be incumbent upon that institution to have in place protocols and programs that help those whose mental health may be deteriorating because as Jadine said, it is a high stress environment.

It can foster really like an intense pressure cooker that could hurt the mental health of a child. Absolutely, and if you're a parent sending your child to university, you're not just paying the university tuition fees so that they can get an education. In many cases, you're also paying the university for their housing, their healthcare if they don't have any other kind of insurance.

They might be extensively involved in recreational activities or career coaching or all kinds of extracurricular activities that make up their social life on campus. One of the analogies that we kind of try to draw in this piece is universities in the present day kind of function like a company town in this way, where students, particularly those who are living on campus, really get enfolded into the institution in all kinds of ways. And that really, I think, puts more of a moral onus on the university to recognize the ways that they can help students in the wake

of like a mental health crisis or a death by suicide, because they're so integrated in every part of a student's life to really not get involved in post-death care, what's called postvention by researchers. That's really like an abdication of moral responsibility. That's something that a lot of the people we talk to have said.

Yeah, Jadine, let's talk about the bare minimum. You know, I think we as a nation want our universities to be viewed around the world as high watermarks by every metric, but specifically as it relates to mental health and resources brought to bear on the issue of death by suicide, prevention of suicide, as well as helping those who've been affected, who've been left behind after one of their friends or classmates has been hurt. What's the bare minimum that we as a community, as a society should be expecting from these universities?

I think it's really important to recognize that postvention is a form of prevention. And the father of suicideology Edmund Shagman did say that when he coined the term postvention. And in the research that we were doing, it looks like, you know, campus officials need to make sure that they respond to the death quite quickly. There can often be a like you know campus officials need to long arc of grief and of difficulty. And so it can be quite helpful to have all the context of somebody who dies by suicide traced, have them all like reached out to and made sure that

those students and staff and faculty are receiving the support that they need in the aftermath. That is ideally what we want to be shooting for because if we don't do that, and also we don't provide that support in a range of forms like on the phone, on text, etc. people are going to fall through the cracks. Yeah. Tamita, with a story like this, I want to end on on a positive note. So in your research, are there any institutions in Canada that are doing right by their student body on this front?

And are there best practices that exist out there that are being implemented that give you any sense of optimism for the future? So the light at the end of the tunnel is that there are best practices. And we actually have really good examples in other countries of them being followed. So in Canada, we don't have a national framework for addressing death by suicide on

campuses. But other countries that have taken that approach, like the UK and Australia, have seen significant uptake by universities. One of the things that we have seen is that because of Canada's distributed education system, universities are mostly left on their own when it comes to devising their mental health policies. There's not a lot of overarching guidance that they can draw on. But there's an abundance of research out there

that does tell us what works, what doesn't work, and provide some really actionable insights for universities. To me, to me, then Jadine, I'm going to have to leave it there. But the article on the walrus.ca is called What Happens After Death on Campus? And I thank you both. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. At Desjardins, we speak business, we speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion

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