NAICS 45511Industry · 5-digitnational market

Department stores

SoftwareRetail Merchandise Planning & Allocation 455

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in retailing a wide range of products, with each merchandise line constituting a separate department within the store. Selected departments may be operated by separate establishments, on a concession basis. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 494
Under 10 employeesA: 0%

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–410%

5–910%

10–1910%

20–4982%

50–995812%

100–19913427%

200–49928658%

500+51%

Of 494 Canadian establishments with employees, 0% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.

Where they areA

Ontario18638%

Quebec8918%

Alberta7215%

British Columbia6513%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Retail Trade, US · opened 2020

88%

1 year

72.3%

3 years

59.8%

5 years

44.2%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 455, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

national competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 455 General merchandise retailers

Scale retail. Not an entry market except for rural general stores, which hold a geographic monopoly over a small catchment.

Who sets the price: National chains.
The software it runs on: Enterprise merchandising, planning and allocation.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 4551 Department stores covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 4551

Full-Line Department StoreStructure decides

binding constraint: growth quality

This is not an entry market, and the record exists to say why in one event rather than in adjectives. Hudson's Bay filed under the CCAA on 7 March 2025 with more than $1.1B of secured debt and about $3M of cash; liquidation sales began within weeks, every store was closed by 1 June 2025 and 8,347 employees were terminated [B]. No going-concern buyer emerged for the chain. What sold was the name: Canadian Tire paid about $30M for the stripes, the coat of arms and the private labels [B]. An attempt to take up to 28 of the leases and relaunch a department store was blocked by the court for 25 of them [B]. The mechanism is that the format's two jobs — assembling brands under one roof and anchoring a mall — have both gone elsewhere: brands sell direct, and landlords now prefer to re-let an anchor box in pieces than to a department store. The pre-screen cut this on capital, and the StatCan shape agrees that it is a scale format — 86% of establishments employ a hundred or more. But capital is not what failed here: Hudson's Bay had 350 years of brand, the locations and a billion dollars of credit, and the category still shrank out from under it. The definition's other door — operating a department on concession — makes the entrant an unsecured creditor of the host, which in this proceeding was the class standing behind more than $1.1B of secured debt. What is reachable is selling to the survivors: the merchandise planning software on this branch is screened separately.

NAICS 45515 vendors named7 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 455 General merchandise retailers

Retail Merchandise Planning & AllocationStructure decides

binding constraint: entry cost

Incumbent Oracle Retail and Blue Yonder (Panasonic)

Enterprise merchandise planning is a data-integration project before it is a product — item hierarchies, store clusters and two years of history must be loaded before the software says anything useful, and the proof of concept alone runs half a year. That is a professional services business with a licence attached, and it needs a balance sheet to survive the sales cycle. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.

NAICS 4556 vendors named3 sourced figuresOpen →

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Retail trade, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Retail sales supervisors One industry 84.7%

Retail and wholesale trade managers One industry 80.1%

Cashiers and other sales support occupations One industry 80%

Retail salespersons and non-technical wholesale trade sales and account representatives Mostly one sector 69.7%

Pharmacists and dietitians Mostly one sector 61%

Medical technologists and technicians One industry 23.6%

Automotive service technicians Mostly one sector 18.7%

Cooks, butchers and bakers Mostly one sector 15.7%

Taxi, personal service and delivery service drivers Mostly one sector 12.2%

Machine operators and related workers in textile, fabric, fur and leather products processing and manufacturing One industry 11.2%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Customer and information services representatives Across the economy 13.5%

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 8.5%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 8.2%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 6.7%

Building maintenance installers, servicers and repairers Across the economy 6.6%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 6%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 5.7%

Survey, statistical and data entry occupations Across the economy 5.4%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 5.3%

Accounting, insurance and related business administrative occupations Across the economy 5%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

Inside this industry

1 row sits directly beneath 45511. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
455110	Department stores	494	screened at 4551