Today I Learned

I read something about the birth of these private Equity firms sometime in the late 70s or early '80s when a firm bought out this other productive firm and loaded them up with debt, paid themselves every which way they could, sold off any profitable parts of the company, then declared bankruptcy and stiffed everybody else walking away with a boatload of cash, unemployed workforces, and razed Pension funds.

We have been celebrating this type of behavior for decades now, Behavior I think exemplified in Monty Python's skits of the pirate building seizing the other buildings like it was a pirate ship.

Rumours of Geoffrey's death where exaggerated

I spent weeks waiting in line at my TRU for a switch and they sold out of it and every game every day. The day after I finally got mine and BOTW, they closed the store.

They were making hand over fist money when they closed

This has become a common thing. It's assumed brick-and-mortar is dying due to Amazon and Temu and such. It's not; they've been on that path for a long time, and the companies that were going to die to it have already gone. However, it is a popular perception.

Private Equity gets to use the popular perception as a cover for shady ass shit.

Shopko was a midwestern chain of department stores. In their final years, they typically staffed like three people for the whole store. It's not as big as a Super Walmart or anything, but it's a sizable store in any case. They had one person on checkout, one in customer service, and one more running around the rest of the store. Maybe one or two more, but suffice it to say, it was deeply understaffed and it felt like it.

Behind the scenes, private equity had been taking out loans against the store's real estate, gave themselves big bonuses with that money, and left the company as a whole with unaffordable debt. Also, the money being taken out at the register for sales taxes wasn't actually being paid to the state.

Shopko was murdered. There is a standalone optical division that still operates, but the rest is gone.

Yeah, this is the case for most "public to private" company moves, and other types of private equity acquisition deals. They are all just a massive shell game to liquidate a company's value and transfer it to those private equity companies. Vulture Capitalism

And the same thing is happening to hospitals all over the US, which should fucking terrify you.

It’s a PE firm. It’s what they do.

TRU currently exists outside US but by retailers in other countries using the brand for their toy stores.

I live in the area the HQ used to be. I know a lot of middle management who got screwed very hard by these guys.

Is this why the one in my area has been closed, but hasn't been turned into something else? It even still has the signage.