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 meant dramatic layoffs, which left stores dangerously understaffed.59 As detailed by Vice News, this had a particularly gruesome effect. With too few employees to transport animals that died at the store, carcasses of dead animals literally piled up in PetSmart freezers across the country. One employee shared a photo she said was filled with two months’ worth of dead animals; another employee said their store had a freezer with ten months’. A third employee said that, for lack of time, she would simply throw bodies away. “Sometimes I was doing it weekly because we didn’t have staff to take a vet trip to properly dispose of them so I was instructed to dispose of them myself,” she told Vice.60 (A spokesman for PetSmart denied to Vice that the store’s standard of care had declined, while a law firm representing the company wrote to the publication that “PetSmart holds the health and well-being of its associates, customers, and pets as its top priority.”)61