Bankruptcy, collapse and aftermath
Woodward's filed for bankruptcy protection on December 11, 1992, after a decade of failing to keep up with the changing retail landscape.[5] In June 1993, Hudson's Bay Company acquired 21 of the total 25 Woodward's locations in a $235 millions takeover.[6] On August 12, 1993, 13 former Woodward's locations instantly opened as The Bay stores while 10 would start renovating in order to be taken over later in the year by Zellers.[6] These 23 conversions include two locations that were split among The Bay and Zellers, at Oakridge Centre and Chinook Centre.[6][7] The four Woodward's locations that closed for good were at Southgate Centre, Mill Woods Town Centre, Northgate Centre and Coquitlam Centre.[8][9]
Edmonton was by far the place the most impacted by the merger, with all but one of the Woodwards closures happening within its city limits.[10][7] In reality, a few of the locations that Hudson's Bay Company had acquired, such as in Park Royal, Bower Place and Sunridge Mall, were used to move existing The Bay or Zellers stores into the Woodward's spaces, resulting in layoffs at those places as well.[11][12] The Woodward's at West Edmonton Mall was initially among the stores that were to permanently close, but it was decided afterwards that it would reopen as The Bay.[13][14]
Woodward's also operated two standalone Furniture Fair stores in Burnaby (which became Costco's first location in Canada in 1985) and Edmonton in the 1970s. There were also discount type stores called Woodwynn (similar to Winners) in BC and Alberta (some within Woodward's Stores), which were originally known as Woodward's Bargain Stores. Several malls also had separate Woodward's Book Stores. The closure of Woodward's locations in many malls sparked redevelopment and expansion of a number of the centres, such as Chinook Centre in Calgary. In a number of malls, the presence of separate operations such as the bookstore and Woodwynn required these stores to also be replaced. When the West Edmonton Mall location closed, The Bay - which already had a full store at the opposite end of the mall - simply converted the former Woodward's into a second Bay (one of the few cases where a single mall has had two duplicate anchor tenants); after a few years of this, however, the Woodward's-Bay was closed and converted into a multi-screen movie theatre, an HMV (now Sunrise Records) location, and additional retail space.
On December 8, 2009, the Woodward's Food Floor reopened for the first time since the chain's sale to Safeway. The new Woodward's Food Floor, which is located in Vancouver at the former Woodward's complex (along with a new location of London Drugs), is now a division of Nester's Market.[15]
