The year was 1670 ...

Do most Americans (meaning the U.S., not North America) even know this company?

It was the oldest company in North America, and yet it ended earlier this month not with a bang or a whimper — but instead with a whole bunch of liquidation sales above the 49th parallel.

Here’s the story:

Back in the year 1670, the English government issued a charter for a company called, “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay,” granting it “sole trade and commerce” over what is now a giant part of Canada and a bit of the Midwestern U.S.

Stretching from modern-day northern Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana, to the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, along with parts of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, and the entire Canadian territory of Nunavut, it had an enormously lucrative opportunity.

Exclusive trading rights with the indigenous people living in those territories — and for many purposes, the right to literally act as the government — led to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The company had so much value that even when it later consented to give up the rights to 95% of its territory to the newly formed government of Canada in 1870 at a massive discount, it still walked away with a fortune.

Fast-forward an era or so, and the company turned that 200-year head start into a retail juggernaut, including department stores that it ran for well over an additional century.

This month, it all ended.

The Company of Adventurers

I wonder how many Americans — meaning those of us who live in the U.S., as opposed to North America at large — actually knew anything about this company before it closed its doors for good this week. Maybe it came up in high school history class.

In Canada, it became iconic. It shortened its name to “Hudson’s Bay Company” (or “HBC” for short), built a network of stores known as “The Bay,” and eventually acquired other department store chains that enabled it to expand across the country.

(Personally, I think they left a golden opportunity on the table by not shortening the name to “The Company of Adventurers” instead, but nobody asked me.)

It had great success for a long time — but after several years of financial struggles, Hudson’s Bay filed for bankruptcy in March, owing more than $1 billion.

The company cited a declining customer base, ongoing troubles stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent trade war with the U.S.

Result: Everything had to go, to the point that before its deadline last week the company offered 90% off sales on its remaining merchandise, and also sold shelving, displays, and even the mannequins off its floors, before closing the doors to its stores — potentially for good.

’30-plus years’

There is some chance that the brands of HBC, if not the company itself, might live on.

Another big Canadian retailer, Canadian Tire, bought HBC’s intellectual property rights. And, a billionaire from British Columbia, Weihong Liu, bought the leases to some of the chain’s stores and reportedly says she has plans to reopen.

In the meantime, I keep thinking about something another icon of retail, Jeff Bezos, once said about how long good companies can expect to last:

Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.

• Amazon’s 31st birthday will be this July 4.

• The company I like to think of as “Amazon before Amazon existed,” Sears, lasted about 133 years. (It’s still technically alive, but when was the last time you thought of Sears?)

• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway just celebrated its 186th anniversary — at least to the extent that its earliest antecedent, the Valley Falls Company, started in 1839.

• New York’s Con Edison is over 200 years old, and a Japanese construction firm, Kongo Gumi, traces its origins back much farther — nearly 1,500 years, to the year 578.

• At least in North America, however, Hudson’s Bay held the record.

It’s reached the end of its run, but what a run it was.

Here’s what it looked like in the very last days.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive economic platform electrified younger voters, surged into the lead in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, putting him on the verge of a stunning upset. Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had led the race for months, conceded the primary and congratulated Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, in remarks after 10 p.m. Cuomo notably did not promise to continue his campaign in November, despite securing a third-party ballot line. (The New York Times)

• A cease-fire between Israel and Iran appeared to be holding on Tuesday, as Israel’s military lifted emergency restrictions imposed during the conflict and Iran’s president hailed “the end of a 12-day war that was imposed on the Iranian people” in an address to the nation. The nascent truce came hours after President Trump lashed out at both countries for launching attacks after he had announced an end to their brief war. (The New York Times)

• A Defense Intelligence Agency report says U.S. military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months. White House reply: "This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community." (CNN)

• Extensive triple digit heat, broken temperature records and oppressive humidity piled up into a steaming mess as the heat dome crushing the Eastern half of the nation sizzled to what should be its worst Tuesday. New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit a little after noon, the first time since 2013. More than 150 million people woke up to heat warnings and forecasters at the National Weather Service expected dozens of places to tie or set new daily high temperature records Tuesday. (AP)

• Hotel owners are in open revolt against Los Angeles’s new $30-an-hour minimum wage, the latest blow to one of the country’s poorest-performing lodging markets. The city council voted last month to boost the wage for workers in hotels with 60 rooms or more. Hourly pay, currently $20.32, will increase every year until it reaches $30 in 2028. (The Wall Street Journal)

• Perched high in the foothills of Chile’s Andes mountains, a revolutionary new space telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just taken its first pictures of the cosmos—and they’re spectacular. The observatory has a few key components: A giant telescope, called the Simonyi Survey Telescope, is connected to the world's largest and highest resolution digital camera. Rubin’s 27-foot primary mirror, paired with a mind-boggling 3,200-megapixel camera, will repeatedly take 30-second exposure images of vast swaths of the sky with unrivaled speed and detail. (Yahoo News)

• A high school in the suburbs of New York City will be seeing double on graduation day this weekend: Among the nearly 500 students in its graduating class, 30 are twins. Among the other schools around the country with big sets of graduating twins are Clovis North High School in Fresno, California, with 14 pairs, and Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, with 10 pairs. Last year, a middle school in suburban Boston had 23 sets of twins in its graduating class; Guinness World Records says the record came from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, which had a whopping 44 twin pairs and a set of triplets in the class of 2017. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.