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But why go through this whole process at all? Why would Friendly’s declare bankruptcy, just to be sold from one Sun Capital fund to another? The answer was simple: pensions. At the time of bankruptcy, Friendly’s had $115 million in pension liabilities.92 By selling Friendly’s to one of its affiliat…

At other times, private equity firms simply hired the wrong people. In 2012, Golden Gate Capital and Blum Capital bought the discount shoe seller Payless.65 As described in a detailed profile in the New York Times, through a series of owners, Payless tumbled through bankruptcy three times in four y…

Sometimes the problem was simply that private equity firms understaffed their stores. For instance, after BC Partners bought PetSmart in 2015, it bragged on its website that it increased the company’s profitability by “improving corporate efficiency.”58 But in practice, according to employees, this…

At the time, many commentators blamed Amazon. But this was, at best, only part of the story. Toys’ sales remained steady, even during the Great Recession, and in the year before it filed for bankruptcy, its $11 billion in revenue17 accounted for an estimated one-fifth of all toy sales in the countr…

Considering all this, it is helpful to see how private equity ownership worked in one specific mobile home community: Plaza Del Rey, in Sunnyvale, California. Sunnyvale sits in the center of Silicon Valley, and its largest employers include Google, Apple, Lockheed Martin, and Amazon. In 2015—the ye…