Maybe a bit of a chicken or egg problem? I don’t know enough about Joann, but I remember when borders closed and B&N went almost too. At the time, these stores had become a bore. Only peddling bill O’Reilly and Hillary Clinton’s books. But now bookstores are thriving too, and so is B&N in large part because each store is managed independently, and not driven by corporate and their large contracts with large publishers.

So maybe when you stop being customer centric and become corporate profit centric you end up losing customers first and profits later.

PE firms in these cases are just the bottom feeders that processes these corporate carcasses, not the cause of their deaths.

It’s different when PE firms go after resources that people need, like health care or elderly care. Here they are acting as sociopaths. They know people will pay as much as they have to, as the other options are death and suffering. Despicable.