re: Jersey Mike's sandwich comparison before private equity vs after

Fair point. I can, however, question their ethics and logic in pursuit of unrealistic financial goals and not understanding or caring about what they are selling. I have seen first hand how they don’t care at all about a company and personally I think that is a terrible way to ruin a company

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Never understood the appeal of buying sandwiches from a sub shop.

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I take it you are not old and spent time in the East Coast?

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IPO and trying to scale too quickly have ruined many a business too. What’s your point?

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My point is there are gargantuan, incumbent public companies who ruin shite all the time - both with their existing products AND with acquisitions of existing products.

Acting as if private equity is purely bad but public equity is blameless is absurdly moronic.

And I would look at Sysco (SYY) as another example of an incumbent public causing infinitely more damage in the food industry than whichever random PE firm bought Jersey Mike's. All restaurants in this country are converging into a unified pile of slop because they're all buying the same ingredients from the same giant supplier.

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No one did this

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Yes, that is the de facto stance of these dumb threads. Every single owner/buyer of every single company will either be public or private. And all sorts of terrible business decisions are made every day at all sorts of companies - public and private. Yet we only have thread after thread on "private equity" ruining things.

It's cherry-picked confirmation bias. For one thing, many times the very reason PE gets involved is because a business is doing poorly and/or is on the ropes (i.e. it can be bought at a supposedly "good price".) That doesn't change the fact that a business in that condition is many times more likely to fail than an already-thriving business.

In many other situations, businesses some of you wring your hands about being in "PE hands" after a large transaction are only known by you because PE bought them very early and grew them into behemoths in the first place.

blame the people who sold the company.

they knew who the snakes they sold the company to.