Since I first wrote about private equity’s looting and ultimate devastation of Mervyn’s (“On Private Equity and Real Estate” September 2012, behind paywall), retailer after retailer has been similarly gutted. Payless Shoes, Toys ‘R’ Us, Gymboree, Sears Holding, Mattress Firm and Radio Shack — all companies at one point owned or controlled by private equity firms — have since filed Chapter 11. In fact, Debtwire, a financial news service, calculates that about forty percent of all US retail bankruptcies in the last three years were private equity backed.
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/04/19/retails-existential-threat-is-private-equity/
