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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

This is a fluff piece with no substance. It talks about how both companies combined are 20% of the market in 2013, and not about how in the 80s and 90s they dominated it. No talk about how both companies let competitors come in and eat their lunch (pun intended.) Just a brief mention of how Monaghan lost focus on the company, the solution to which is apparently to sell it off to vulture capitalists who have continued to run it into the ground. No talk about how Monaghan's Catholic zealotry has resulted in the decline of a massive company to the detriment of its thousands of employees and hundreds of franchise owners.

There's a wealth of interesting topics to talk about in this story, and Business Week did a great job avoiding all of it.

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"Zealotry" is an unnecessarily inflammatory term. And do you really believe that every business owner has a responsibility to run his business as successfully as possible, even if it violates his own conscience? And do you believe that a former business owner should accept responsibility for the actions of the buyer after selling the business?

edit: I do definitely agree with you that a story about the decline of the two businesses would have been much more interesting. And a story of the mini-comeback, in the case of Little Caesar's.

Inflammatory or not if you compare Monaghan to the average Catholic in the US, he comes off as a zealot, IMHO. And I guarantee he takes less offense at me calling him a name than I do at his actual actions that have real consequences in the lives of people who do not share his views. It's fine to hold whatever beliefs you want, and it's fine to take actions on those beliefs as long as they either don't affect others or only affect others in ways they would agree improve their lives. What's not ok is when you take action on your beliefs that harms others.

As far as being responsible for the actions of whomever you sell the company to, I think it's pretty obvious here why I blame him for the actions of Bain Capital. Because it's well known what Bain Capital does to most of the companies it buys. They have a reputation as the pre-eminent vulture capitalists for a reason. So given that it's well known what these guys do and he chose to sell to them, then yes, he can be held responsible for them doing exactly what you'd expect to do. If you put your dog in charge of watching the steaks while they rest, it's your fault when the dog eats them.

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