Grizzly

Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing. In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion. Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't failing. It wasn't asking to be saved. But in a leveraged buyout, the firms don't pay with their own money. They borrow against the company they're buying, and the debt becomes the company's problem, not theirs. Toys R Us went from having almost no debt to carrying over $5 billion in loans it never asked for and never benefited from. Every year after that, a huge share of the company's profit went straight to interest payments instead of stores, inventory, or staff. The stores got run down. Amazon and Walmart kept eating market share. Toys R Us couldn't invest its way out because there was nothing left after the debt. In 2017 it filed for bankruptcy. In 2018 it liquidated completely. 33,000 employees lost their jobs. Store closures. No severance for most of them. Giovanna De La Rosa worked there for years. She testified before Congress on November 19, 2019, describing what it meant to lose her income with nothing after decades of loyalty to a company that had been profitable the entire time she worked there. The firms that bought it walked away having collected management fees for over a decade, regardless of outcome. Here's the sentence that explains the entire model: the buyers cannot lose. The debt belongs to the company. The fees get collected either way. They didn't buy a business to grow it. They bought a business to extract from it, and left 33,000 people holding what was left.