Quote: (03-29-2018 11:30 PM)speculator Wrote:
Quote: (03-29-2018 07:54 PM)porscheguy Wrote:
I mentioned in another thread, toys r us went bankrupt because they were bought buy Bain Capital through a leveraged buyout. Consumers could care less about SJW shit.
When they were bought by Bain Capital, they had $2.3billion in debt that they were able to service. Through their creative accounting, they pushed enough debt onto toys r us to the tune of $7.6billion which cost toys r us $400 million annually to service. In 2016 they reported a loss of $29 million. They would have generated substantial profit had they not been saddled with such heavy debt obligations.
Like I said, consumers give zero fucks about SJW tripe when Black Friday rolls around. Toys r us is dying because they got fucked by private equity, and weren’t able to adapt to changing market conditions.
Good observation. Very few people know about leveraged buyouts and their disastrous affects on the economy. The same exact thing is happening to Guitar Center stores that are straddled with $1 billion debt due to Bain Capital's shenanigans. iHeartMedia, the largest U.S. radio station owner, filed for Chapter 11 protections due to $20 billion debt. Those fuckers at Bain are bankrupting the companies to sell their most valuable asset, land and buildings.
These buyout and consolidations are also a big reason the media became so leftist. We should do an entire thread on this.
Back in 1996, Bill Clinton signed off on a piece of legislation called the Telecommunications Act. It overturned anti-monopoly laws that banned companies from owning more than one radio station or newspaper per city. It also allowed conglomerates to operate multiple stations.
What happened was that FM radio started to become "syndicated." Local programming fell by the wayside and was replaced with the faceless "Jack FM" format which had no DJs. Other stations kept only their morning DJs and went syndicated the rest of the day.
In the newspaper realm, this act allowed big city papers to buy up local community papers. It also let companies like Tribune Media snap up multiple dailies like The Baltimore Sun and The LA Times.
When you talked to people about this, they'd laugh. Who cared about stupid FM stations or "community papers" (har har)?
And then they disappeared. And we had a lot fewer independent voices. This stuff mattered in ways that weren't obvious. One reason daily papers used to be so great is that they used community papers as a "farm team" and used to pull writers from there. As such, you got all sorts of ideas. Now you get millennial stiffs who come programmed straight from the colleges and all say the exact same thing.
In the mid-1990s, I was working for a big chain of respected community papers that was known for being iconoclastic. But when we got bought out by Tribune Media, we had to conform to their culture, which was "corporate leftism."
You know the drill: Bullshit HR policies, restrictions on what was allowed to be printed, seminar after seminar on "diversity." And then they killed off the community papers as a separate voice when they folded them into the city paper. Oh, and they also killed of the "alternative weekly."*
The corporate behemoth is now affecting everyone in the realm of social media. IMO people were meant to live among small business, not the giant corporate fist.
I probably should have written this as an article. It's a major pet peeve. Anyway, Toys R Us might means one less option for consumers, which means the big companies can collude to jack up prices.
* Funny addendum. The corporation made a big deal of appointing a woman to do these mergers. She laid off dozens and dozens of people and killed off local newspapers that spanned back decades. What did she get for her efforts? Laid off herself! There was no one left for her to manage -- something she didn't see coming. She now does PR. Moral: Beware the corporation than makes you the executioner...because you might be the one who executes yourself out of a job someday.
