How did Joann Fabrics die while Best Buy survived? It wasn't Amazon
governance.fyi
governance.fyi
The banks are betting that the company/brand, once stripped of any valuable assets and being stretched to painful profitability at the cost of its reputation, will last long enough, with enough assets left at bankruptcy, that their high-interest, high-priority debt will be more than repaid.
If the private equity buys a firm in a leveraged buyout, sells off all its assets in a week, and shuts down immediately, it's the banks that get stiffed; The banks aren't idiots.
If you for some reason prioritize long-term survival & good/service provision of the ailing business, you need to take a bite out of the banks funding private equity takeovers that hit chapter 11 ("reorganization bankruptcy") or deprioritize their debt in chapter 7 ("liquidation bankruptcy") to disincentivize them providing funds.
There are certain shenanigans with private equity related to valuation and compensation ("My company is worth $1000, so I'm awarding myself 50% shares as part of a tax exempt retirement plan") that should be not just outlawed, but which should cause the IRS to send a CPA to go back and slap them in the face with a wet trout for having the fucking gall.
The cycle of enshittification that private equity often participates in, is less a problem with the fact of private equity, and more a problem with the giant piles of money in the finance industry growing much larger and taller than the economy they are theoretically structurally resting on. A problem with financialization and wealth inequality itself, with the system designed for upwards wealth redistribution, trying to transfer the last 10% of the world's money (which the poor are using as their medium of exchange) into the same dragon's hoard that has the rest.
The company is already walking dead; they're just feasting on the corpse. Left alone they'd peter out faster.
Is that actually true, or just a story used to justify the bad actions? There are a lot of meme-stories like the latter, floating to justify all kinds of money-making behavior. People with money have the resources to plant them.
One way to tell is if the company does not emerge from bankruptcy but instead liquidates - it was probably already dead.
I would say it's even the thesis of the article. Joann Fabrics was a healthy company with customer demand and zero debt and was basically assassinated by a leveraged buyout.
Why not and how would you stop? It’s no different than a company issuing bonds to buy back its own equity.
I agree that it’s contributing to the enshitification of many end consumer industries, but I’m not sure what such a “ban” would look like it practice.
And yes, people will try to wiggle around it. That's what regulatory agencies are for. Yeah, they don't 100% work. Believe me, you're unlikely to out-cynic me.
It should still be illegal.
Which was illegal until 1982 and could be made illegal again.
That being said, it seems criminal to take an enormous management fee while sending a company into bankruptcy.
Essentially, that means some amount of corporate risk is leveraged upon the principal investors.
This is common practice in the EU for so-called "club deals".
A buyer at Best Buy or Costco explicitly made a decision to stock the item at the store/warehouse, where shelf space is not free. If that item has a lot of returns or complaints, the store will stop selling the product. It takes up space where a better product could be, and returns waste the time of employees.
Amazon doesn't have these controls. Listing an item on Amazon is cheap and Amazon has no incentive to prune their marketplace of junk. The only controls on Amazon are user reviews which can be gamed.
Also they're typically right on par with Amazon's pricing and no need to wait for it to ship, just a quick trip there and back (although they usually get me buying something I didn't go there for) >:(
Me too but I enjoy browsing through the store so it’s (sometimes not so much) cheap entertainment.
Of course, that eliminates 90% of their "inventory", but I only ever wanted to buy computer products from them anyway.
"$1.3 billion came from the buyers’ own pockets”
"PE consortium collected $470 million in fees and interest over the course of ownership”
So they lost $830M on the deal?
The article touches on this a little in vague terms, citing some studies, which is more than I can say for most. If this is an economically destructive dynamic, and it most certainly feels like it is, then some type of investor must be losing out, right?? It seems worth it to focus on who those parties are to see if that source of energy can be cut off.
It's important that firms are not led in a way that prevents them from competing on price, and that may require limiting how they may take on debt.
(Why do private equity firms want to be in this business? Because the 59% that don't fail often generate very good returns.)
The way they limit their own exposure to risk seems to increase the odds of the targeted business completely failing, though. I think that's the part people have a problem with.
This idea of bits vs atoms was stolen straight from the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. During the infamous Silicon-Valley-TV-Show-esque Las Vegas company offsite, one of his big talks was about how Uber had to not only deal with bits, ie. the virtual world, but also atoms, ie. the real world. That made it a bigger challenge than all the other companies like Google, Facebook, etc where they could dictate their own rules since they controlled everything, but Uber didn't have that luxury.
Once again, you can't lump all PE groups into one all cohorts. All of these companies were bought out by Large-cap PE which is notoriously predatory. They may have an overwhelming amount of the drypowder, but in terms of absolutely number of PE groups, there are far more operating in the middle and lower middle market who don't do this.
You mean, until they do.
or consolidate into someone who does.
But 15 minutes away there's another Best Buy that has a dedicated PC hardware section that almost reminds me of going to Fry's back in the day. I was flabbergasted the first time I walked in there, I almost thought I'd been mistaken and entered a different store.
That said, I purchased some peripherals at BB a few months ago because they had what I needed in stock and the price was better than Logitech and the same as Amazon.
Hah. I bought an Apple Pencil from BB. Shrink-wrapped in the box. I get home, the battery won't charge. I figured out from the S/N that someone had bought a new pencil, put their dead one in the box, shrink-wrapped it, returned it, BB put it back into stock, and I ended up with it.
Fortunately, BB replaced it for me, but I've never had this issue with a single Amazon item I've purchased and I've done a lot more shopping from Amazon than BB.
It was supposed to be brand new, not a used item.
For me, living first in Baltimore then NYC, places where there's quite a few people buying quite a few things up and down the cost scale, I never saw a counterfeit anything come up.
That's not to say I think it doesn't happen, just that I think that's why some people have wildly different experiences here.
Not for nothing, but I can’t remember the last time I purchased anything computer related that was shrink wrapped. It’s all single-use-obvious-if-opened tape
Nearly every time I've bought cheap USB-C cables off Amazon they didn't perform as advertised. The few times I bought name-brand ones they looked different from the ones I've bought at in-person stores and once again failed to perform as advertised (likely counterfeit).
I avoid Amazon as much as possible these days.
After years (my whole adolescent and adult life, more or less) of online shopping, I find that it's actually quite refreshing to go to the store, find the product I need, and purchase it. I have it immediately, I got to handle a demo unit and get a feel for it. If I need to return it, I go back to the same store and get my money back the same day.
There are pros and cons to both, for sure, but these days I find I'm valuing the offline experience more and more.
I'd much rather drive somewhere fun with the kids, work on a hobby, read a book, or just frankly sit and do nothing than go to a store.
But perhaps, as another commenter mentioned, this varies a lot depending on the store you're in?
Regardless, at least for my needs, Best Buy has nearly nothing for me. That didn't used to be true.
Ofcourse most electronics stores will die or are already dead but a few will remain in business.
"IT'S STILL NICE TO GO ANd browse video games in the physical store..... AAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......"
With a focus on fabric and yarn, they would still be here - maybe. Handcock Fabrics went the same way and they died. Hopefully, someone will take a clue and start a new focused venture. Buying fabric over the web is horrendous.
And 800+ stores doesn’t seem like over saturation, it looks like there are more BestBuy and Hobby Lobby stores than that and they both sell stuff that most folks would feel equally comfortable buying online. Where, as you rightly stated, buying fabric online is a non starter for most folks.
My experience was similar to the author, bare shelves and 1 or 2 folks around to help customers…it honestly felt more like purposeful neglect on the part of the owners.
They sold a whole lot more than fabric.
But really, the app is terrible. And an app is table stakes these days. It's just remarkable how bad it is.
For anyone who can see past their own mental blocks and reads this far, the Best Buy app has 1.5 MILLION ratings on the App Store and is #18 in worldwide shopping apps. The Walmart app has SEVENTEEN MILLION ratings. But yeah, nobody uses shopping apps. Silly me!