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.
It’s even worse than that. Imagine you bought a car from a dealership and were making monthly payments on it. I take a loan to buy your debt from the car dealership, sell your car to pay my loan off, and then expect you to continue making your monthly car payments to me. You file bankruptcy to get out from under the debt, but by then I’ve pocketed months or years of your car payments and come out with a tidy profit.
And then I do it to hundreds of other people, over and over again, as long as other rich people are willing to loan me money. Which of course they are, because running companies into bankruptcy is incredibly profitable.
Something something road to serfdom.
Well fuck … that’s even more depressing.