The New Old North West Company
5 Feb
We are familiar with the Northern, the grocery and general merchandise chain whose stores dot the communities of the far north.
We’ve even got a story about the Northern in Baker Lake, Nunavut, where, after a rationed, 50-day canoe trip, we imagined the treats we could reward ourselves with — a cold Pepsi was one of them — only to find we’d paddled into town after the store had closed!
We were surprised to learn, though, in THIS Toronto Globe and Mail interview that the parent company of the Northern traces its history and name back to the old North West Company, the fur trade outfit that plied the waters from Montreal to Grand Portage and beyond.
We’ll admit we kind of lost track of the North West Company around, oh, 1821 when it merged with the rival Hudson’s Bay Company. But the modern-day “Bay” spun off its northern retail enterprises in 1987, and the new outfit took on the old name North West Company.
“It was by choice,” North West Company president Edward Kennedy explains in the interview with Gordon Pitts. “When we used the words ‘enterprising merchants since 1779,’ we chose the starting point of the North West partnership in Montreal.”
The company has grown since its re-establishment — it’s now worth as much as its old parent company, according to Kennedy, thanks to a focus on serving northern needs.
Our northern needs were ultimately served at the Baker Lake Northern, by the way. And, for a couple of skinny guys at the end of a long canoe trip, we didn’t even fill our shopping baskets to embarrassing heights when the store opened the next morning.
The Northern’s walnut butter torts, however, were one impulse purchase we could not fight.
