this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Today I Learned

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Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.

Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.

The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.

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[–] NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago

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

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 4 points 26 minutes ago

"Millennials are ruining the [_] industry! How dare they-"

Oh right, it was capitalist greed all along. Excuse me while I shed a tear for your precious local Applebee's as you keep voting for the people who enable these acquisition monopolies, lmao

[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (4 children)

collapsed inline media
Rumours of Geoffrey's death where exaggerated

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[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

It's a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they've lost billions on this. Why haven't they done anything?

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