わはは: Every article about Red Lobster filing for bankruptcy is "ha ha endless shrimp, what did they think would happen" and then buried ten paragraphs down is the usual:

Every article about Red Lobster filing for bankruptcy is "ha ha endless shrimp, what did they think would happen" and then buried ten paragraphs down is the usual:

Obligatory "wow, this took off, look at this thing I made which has nothing to do with the original tweet" tweet! (but also: fuck capitalism; free Palestine) youtu.be/RDguvD296XA

It's MyGO!!!!! essay #1: You CAN Please Everyone - Servicing BanG Dream! Fans Old & Newyoutu.be [English closed captions available for those who want/need them!]BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! might seem at first glance to be unfriendly to newcomers AND an u...

Oh, here's the link to the original article; figures the one time I forget to post a link is when the tweet actually takes off, lol Muting this thread for the sake of my mentions! ♥️ www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/f...

What went wrong at Red Lobster | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com Red Lobster, the poster child for American seafood, was dragged down by corporate mismanagement, competition and consumer shifts.

Also just gross mismanagement: arrogant and bad executive tastes, short staffing, and self-dealing. It’s almost like someone put idiots in charge so they could pick the bones.

That’s how private equity and a lot of other normal corporations work these days. Idiot children in charge.

Melted flavorless Crisco with yellow food color in place of butter. Not even salted!

oh no did i release your post from containment are you famous now can i get your autograph

Someone sure did, lol

...oops?

Had to be done.

Private equity by almost all accounts is a disaster for everyone except the ones taking the company private. Everyone else gets f*cked.

I still don't understand how the people taking the company private don't get stuck with the debt. It just seems like a way to get money for basically free otherwise, which seems legally questionable.

On the one hand, yes, absolutely. On the other hand, have you considered that these people are friends with a great many legislators?

Hmm, wonder if it has anything to do with the free money they suck out of places

Something to do with something getting sucked out of somewhere.

But for a real answer (to the best of my knowledge, happy to be corrected), the reason is that the debt is taken out by the company, and so legally attaches to that corporate entity. Now, when the PE folks burden the company with that debt, they're the corporate officers and can then (ctd)

Disburse that money as they see fit. And they do. To investors. Then they typically engage in scorched-earth cost-cutting, robbing the future of the company to lower overhead today, and use that "profitability" to take the company public again, where the equity ownership passes to (ctd)

The new shareholders that purchased stock in the company on the open market.

Oh, gotcha, so it's a bigger fool scam, basically--you pass the company you've purchased along to some sucker and then bail before the company fails.

You’re largely right here, but the story doesn’t hold together in one key way. If you destroy the future of the company, no one wants to buy it from you. So the goal is always to make the company grow and become more valuable. That’s where you actually make a return (for your investors and yourself)

It's a legal version of the mafia bust out and it's the entirety of conservative economic policy at every level. youtu.be/EuPvjngCcOg?...

Bust Outs In The Sopranos And Goodfellasyoutu.be These clips are taken from the following TV episodes and movies:*The Sopranos: The Happy Wanderer; Bust Out**GoodFellas (1990)*

Because American lawmakers have made it happen this way, carving out special exceptions in bankruptcy law for business over decades. There are some decent arguments for it I guess, but we see the reality of how it actually works out

I believe what they do is form a separate entity that is saddled w/the debt and rental payments of the "parent" company. I know Johnson and Johnson tried to do something similarly skeezy w/the talc lawsuit where they made a separate "bankrupt" company that "couldn't afford" settlement payments.

A couple of coal companies have tried this too, making a company that just owns pension payments and black lung cases... I think they failed to get away with it but I am way past my expertise.

Related (perhaps tangentially) to that: J&J went on to push their old stock of talc into countries with fewer/no regulations on it, under the same old brand. Japan is one such place. The baby powder I bought just yesterday (thinking surely it must be changed now) is still talc.

Unfortunately the bankruptcy code is written in such a way that is can be (mis)used for precisely this purpose. It probably needs to be overhauled for this very reason but that's not exactly a front burner issue in Congress or anywhere else at the moment.

As one of my law school profs liked to say, in a different context, you don't see people marching in the street demanding bankruptcy reform.

Every time they reform the bankruptcy law, they don't touch the corporate sections, they just make it harder for individuals. Did you know student loans used to be dischargeable in bankruptcy like any other debt?

I believe that has been the case for years although I haven't practiced law in 20 years now and my bankruptcy practice was somewhat limited when I did. With that said, I'm not surprised.

It was the last reform act. Because of course.

It’s not inherently bad. If you have a publicly held restaurant with assets like RE but outdated kitchens and buildings and need to raise cash for upgrades selling the RE to finance that isn’t all bad. But they just sell it and take the money in management fees. So you’re really just strip mining.

That’s exactly that they do. It’s how leveraged buyouts work. “Heads they win. Tails you lose.” kind of situation. They need to be regulated into oblivion before society collapses.

I don't know how the banks lending the money can look at these deals and go "This time is different."

Paging @wyden.senate.gov - why is this still a thing? It's destroying businesses.

I think morally questionable as well. The change is not to the advantage of the restaurant, the employees, and society. It is strictly to the few who come up with the scheme.

They are eviscerating healthcare as we speak. Think one predatory middle man (private insurance) was bad enough? Now we get to have two!

And what pisses me off the most about PE is that it's a rational use case! You CAN take companies private, turn them around, and either take them public again, or keep them to generate cash flow for more acquisitions. That's a legitimate way to create economic value! (Ctd)

Instead, we basically have billionaire house flippers except somehow actually worse because they do the equivalent of buying the house, taking out a massive second mortgage to pay off their investors, stripping out the copper piping to do likewise, and then selling it off leaving others with the bag

See also: the fuckers who ran Instant Pot into bankruptcy in less than FOUR YEARS because they debt loaded it and diluted their brand by trying to massively expand their product line, rather than responsibly manage a company with a rock solid product and a devoted customer base.

The sheer amount of economic value destruction and immiseration these sociopaths do in order to pad their own already immeasurable bank accounts isn't just immoral, it extrapolates into an incredible indictment of a society that tolerates them rather than throwing them in gibbets lining Wall St

*deep breath* Yes, I will pull around to the next window. You did get that I wanted curly fries, right?

Most bankruptcy articles bury PE's involvement somewhere in the middle, ensuring the leitmotif of their rapacious destruction of otherwise steady businesses escapes the Average Joe's notice.

See also Toys R US, Pier One Imports....

Oh, is that what happened to Pier 1 too? Fuck them.

They get theirs when society collapses and their private security decide to become feudal lords.

So stealing this

We need a song to go with it. “And I killed Toys R Us, too!”

Mitt Romneys firm killed Geoffrey the Giraffe. Never forget, never forgive.

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