Comment by outop
2 years ago
I think this is naive. When (for example) a private equity fund buys a casual dining chain, they will go through how the business is run in painstaking detail and try to understand exactly what makes the experience 'work' and what changes are possible or advisable.
If the olives in the salad don't taste as good or there are fewer breadsticks or the lighting makes it feel more relaxed or the greeters have more time or the menu gets shorter or the desserts arrive quicker or the pasta is less salty, that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there. There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.
If the food gets worse and it just doesn't have that same vibe anymore and you don't want to go there next time, it's because an expert in marketing or restaurant management or food design made an error in their judgement about what they could cut, what they should improve, and what they needed to keep the same. That, or the change which turned you off attracted more customers or more desirable customers who have different preferences to you.
Your restaurant changed because its corporate policy changed. But the capital structure is totally relevant in understanding why that changed.
> There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.
Not directly, but only 1 step removed. The dude is saying "let's charge the same or more for cheaper, lower-quality food, to make a higher margin so our PE firm makes more money".
> that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there.
Evidently not really taking the factors into account. Would the limited partners eat there? More than once?
I don't see the relevance of this. No one eats at Red Lobster thinking "this is the exact dinner experience that billionaires would design for themselves".
Walmart is a family owned business. Do you think that the Walton family buy groceries and home furnishings there? McDonald's is a public company. Do you think that its CEO and the fund managers who hold the biggest stakes in it regularly eat there?
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What makes you think that PE equity owners have any different incentives to any other chain restaurant owners to cut costs and improve margins??
Why would you think that private equity owners would ever make things worse to improve margins without giving careful consideration to whether or not the changes will make people less likely to spend money at their restaurants??
Because PE equity owners DO have different incentives. It's reasonable to think things that are true.
PE is incentivised to squeeze the business and extract the value built up over time, to get large, quick returns, even if it destroys the business (they can sell the corpse after). A restaurant which delivers regular, single-digit restaurant margins indefinitely would be considered a PE investment failure.
So, the answer your 2nd question is also "because it's true". I'm happy to be convinced otherwise on either count, if you think differently.
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Do you think private equity funds could have other end goals when buying a company?
Other end goals than what?
Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do.
Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their products and compete to drive other retailers out of business. (Neither does General Mills, who used to own Red Lobster, nor Darden Restaurants, the public spin-off that owned Olive Garden and Red Lobster, nor Starboard Value, the activist investor that pushed for Red Lobster to be sold.) None of these companies exists because of a high-minded commitment to customer service, or fair play, or delicious food.
If turning a viable restaurant chain into a chain that no one wants to go to and then selling it is an attractive business proposition for private equity, than it should be for McDonald's and Walmart too. Unless you can point to some specific causal connection between the ownership structure and the decision about whether or not a restaurant should serve stuff that people actually want to eat?
The example of McDonald's acquiring value through real estate, funded by the business, is pretty poingnant, considering the PE firm here did the exact opposite: sold all the valuable real estate and rented it back from the buyer under crippling rent payments, funded by the business.
Why did the PE firm do that when McDonald's didn't?
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