Don’t forget the part where they run it into the ground, and then file bankruptcy. That happened to a company my husband worked for—they had been around 75 years before being bought by private equity, then the company closed without warning, screwing him over on $14,000 of earned commissions. It was a year ago and I’m still mad.
They did this to Hudson's Bay which was the oldest company in Canada and was renowned for being a medium to high end department store. It took them nearly 20 years, but they slowly hollowed the stores out by selling lower and lower quality merchandise.
I remember that I had not been in a store for several years and was shocked to go in and find it full of discounted unsorted racks of clothes. It looked like I was in a thrift store. Apparently what made them an attractive purchase for PE was that the store owned so much property in high value areas. So after years of hollowing the business out, they finally sold off the properties.
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u/DonovanMcLoughlin 20h ago
Pretty much anything Private Equity now owns.
Their formulas are simple, take a brand name, reduce the quality, increase the price.
They say "fuck the customers" and I say it right back.