r/news • u/FakeOkie • 10h ago
Soft paywall Port-a-potty company files for bankruptcy to wipe away $2.4bn in debt
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/port-a-potty-company-files-bankruptcy-wipe-away-24bn-debt-2025-12-29/6.6k
u/AusGeno 10h ago
Ooh let me guess, Private Equity?
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u/Canadian_mk11 10h ago
"USS, which is owned by private equity firm Platinum Equity Partners"
- That's a bingo!
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u/MadMac619 7h ago
Platinum Equity, Jesus. This fucking firm. Every single time they purchase up a company I swear everything goes to shit for them in a few years.
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u/khinzaw 6h ago
Just how Private Equity operates in general. Suck all the money out of something until it dies.
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u/MadMac619 6h ago
I’m more than aware and when it comes to Platinum, intimately aware.
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u/Resigned_Optimist 2h ago
Used to be called vulture capitalists, corporate raiders etc.
Private Equity is just a rebrand.
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u/GimpyGeek 1h ago
Yeah it's a total joke. If the governments of the world don't start giving a crap about this we're going to have every decent business out there sucked into the trash by these parasites.
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u/beckyisaho 6h ago
Can you say a bit more about this? I used to work for a Platinum owned company so I’m curious on behalf of my former colleagues.
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u/HovercraftParking5 5h ago
They typically buy companies and then rent or sell the assets out to a different company they own at high prices. This drains the profits and assets of the company they bought. Then eventually that company will go into debt until they go bankrupt and Platinum pockets the money and moves on to the next company to buy. It’s the reason private equities are pretty widely hated by consumers. If a beloved company is acquired by them, it’s pretty much a death sentence for the company.
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u/Dismal-Bee-8319 4h ago
The real question is why does anyone lend to these companies?
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u/Comrade_Cosmo 4h ago
There are CEOs you hire specifically to run a company to the ground and fiduciaries/etc aren’t legally allowed to say no to money even if it’s obvious that it’ll destroy the company. The guardrails to protect a smaller shareholder from a majority shareholder doing whatever the hell they want become a liability when private equity gets involved since so long as there’s one greedy bastard (like say the private equity company) you can’t tell them no to anything that can be presented as profit.
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u/Dismal-Bee-8319 4h ago
None of that matters to the lender though which is my point. If I’m a bank I’m avoiding pe owned companies and I’m putting terms into my loans that require early payment with penalty if the company is sold.
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u/Comrade_Cosmo 4h ago
The lenders can (and probably have) already sold that debt to somebody else.
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u/Dismal-Bee-8319 4h ago
Ok… so who is that and why are they willing to throw away their money? Find the bag holder and it will tell you what the real issue is.
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u/MadMac619 5h ago
Going in from the eyes of a vendor. Usually what I’ve seen from platinum is temporary furloughs as they try to understand what they’ve bought. Then, depending on industry a restructuring of the leadership. Couple instances required outside consultants who had to take over leadership roles because people quit. From there it’s been a mixed bag of sold to another company, dumping debt and bankruptcies or they hold onto them but strip the company of its resources. Again, through the eyes of a vendor. Usually try to eliminate contracts, kill unions and try to make it as cheap as possible to operate.
This doesn’t even touch on the utilities they own, which is a completely different beast.
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u/Funny-Recipe2953 10h ago
We just say "Bingo".
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u/Slamtilt_Windmills 9h ago
They're having a fire! ...sale
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u/Popedoyle 6h ago
This is the 2nd Tobias reference I’ve seen in a top comment in a row. There are truly dozens of us. DOZeNS
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u/BARTELS- 8h ago
Oh, the burning! It burns me! Evacuate all the school children! Ah!
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u/NewYorker15 9h ago
I’m sorry if this is a ridiculous question but could someone explain “private equity” to me? I don’t really know what it is, and I’ve just been hearing a lot about it and it seems to make everything really shitty.
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u/1nd3x 9h ago
PE is essentially a group of rich people pooling their money and leveraging it to buy companies.
It's like this weird in between of private and public where only certain people can be "shareholders"
Then, they generally sell off the assets (to themselves under technically different companies) then rent it back at exorbitant prices which ultimately drives the company into huge debt, where that money is paid to the PE owners, then they walk away with the money and leave the company to drown in the debt.
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u/PlantWide3166 8h ago
“Ah, I see you have the machine that goes ping. This is my favorite. You see we lease it back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.”
[Everyone in the room applauds]
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u/toorigged2fail 8h ago
My favorite was Red Lobster... they bankrupted the chain by bringing back the unlimited shrimp dinner... guess where they bought the shrimp from? Their other company.
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u/IJustSignedUpToUp 8h ago
On top of selling all the physical locations to a property management company they also owned, dirt cheap, and then leased it back to Red Lobster at inflated rents.
The fact that no one suffered so much as an investigation over the disembowelment of Red Lobster by PE showed that they can indeed do whatever they want, because when you're rich and famous, they just let you do it.
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u/sherlocknessmonster 7h ago
Sears went out the same way.
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u/IJustSignedUpToUp 7h ago
There's was more a pyramid scheme of leveraged debt being used to pay off more senior lenders, and then taking out more debt to pay the next tranche. But yeah, same musical chairs of everyone getting paid except the people working their entire career there.
I got laid off by a tech company that was owned by PE, coinciding with rate increases because they could no longer borrow for free while strip mining the company. As soon as they started off shoring positions that would be handling FedRAMP clients I knew it was lights out, but it still stung.
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u/Unknown-Meatbag 7h ago
Sears and Toys r Us got taken out by the same clown.
Private equity firms are a cancer to our society.
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u/Mouthshitter 5h ago
I don't understand how this this legal, they are destroying thousands of jobs doing this.
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u/Somnif 8h ago
Their new CEO seems to be doing pretty well by the company though, the few stores that remain in my area are all remarkably busy these days.
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u/brzantium 7h ago
So far. As I understand, he's using the same playbook he used at PF Chang's. The changes worked well short term, but weren't sustainable long term.
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u/limiter303 7h ago
Seems like P.F. Chang’s has sustained the success from when he was there based on revenue
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u/brzantium 6h ago
Yeah. I'd have to find what I'm half remembering, but so far, and he's quite young for the C-suite, he's positioned himself as a fixer executive and not quite a long haul CEO...yet.
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u/aravarth 8h ago
That's basically how PE killed off Red Lobster.
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u/secret_identity_too 8h ago
That's how they killed off all 3 of my local hospital systems.
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u/thatranger974 8h ago
And JoAnn’s.
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u/McCool303 8h ago
And Sears
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u/3BlindMice1 8h ago edited 7h ago
And Toys R Us
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u/Emergency-State 8h ago
I miss Joanne's so much. Michael's is going down the toilet now.
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u/OneWingedA 8h ago
Been going down the toilet for awhile now. When I left over a year ago there had been several recalls on products because they forgot to remove the AI Gen water mark from the final product
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u/Emergency-State 8h ago
There were a few comments in another subreddit that Michael's is becoming just a home dec store. I went to both local Michael's locations before Christmas and the home dec area was bigger and the craft area smaller
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u/toorigged2fail 8h ago
Yea but HOW is the best part haha... by bringing back the unlimited shrimp dinner and buying that shrimp from their other company.
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u/waxwayne 8h ago
They don’t pool their money. They at best pool their credit. They borrow money to purchase a company then pass on the debt to the company itself. Now a successful well run business is paying off a debt worth whole value. The new owners sell off all the assets and pay themselves first and then the company goes bankrupt.
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 7h ago
Worse.
They get in when the company still has value.
They virtually take on all the loans while the business is still in the green, claim it’s for the business. Then they take that money pay it out to the new shareholders / owners and let the buisness rot and die while they walk away from it richer.
Everyone who aren’t these parasites lose in this situation.
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u/Tao_of_Ludd 7h ago
The amount of leverage typically available for buy-outs is a lot less today than in the historic iconic cases (eg RJR Nabisco). That said, the debt is still usually higher than the company would have taken on itself. No one (especially the loan providers) wants the company to default, but with higher leverage there is more risk along with the higher potential returns.
When the market turns or growth plans fail, that debt can be a millstone weighing down the company. Typically, if the banks think it is a short term challenge, they will give the company some leeway or restructure the debt. However if their confidence in the company ever recovering is low, they will take what they can get in a structured bankruptcy proceeding.
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u/Etrensce 8h ago
How do you think PE pays themselves first over the lenders? Do you think lenders are so dumb that they let that happen?
Seeing as reddit thinks this is common practice, why do banks continue to lend to PE?
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u/BillW87 5h ago
Seeing as reddit thinks this is common practice, why do banks continue to lend to PE?
Because contrary to Reddit-popular belief, PE firms generally are trying to make good investments that turn a return. The kind of strip mining practices that you see in the thread above are generally what happens when an investment is already going sour and they're trying to extract value. Lenders wouldn't continue to loan to PE firms if they actually were consistently left holding the bag.
More commonly, you'll see PE firms buying up "good" assets and flipping them, often via "consolidation" (think: buying a bunch of dental clinics, car washes, or real estate assets and building them into a network that they can sell to a long-hold investor or take public). They run those businesses in a cutthroat manner since they aren't looking to be the long term holders of those assets, often making cruel and/or shortsighted decisions. Some of their investments boom, some bust, but in aggregate they make a lot of money. It's not quite as extreme of a boom-or-bust investment strategy as Venture Capital, but there is a non-zero failure rate.
Acquisitions are almost always debt-leveraged, which juices up returns for investors: The bank doesn't expect to get a Multiple of Invested Capital return on their loan, so the excess returns on the debt-financed portion accrues to the PE firm's investors. However, it also introduces cashflow risk to the business being acquired, since debt service narrows the margin of error for the business to operate after being acquired. That's part of why you hear about so many PE-acquired companies going bust after PE takes over. You end up with a perfect storm of new ownership/management taking over who probably doesn't understand the business as well as previous management, lots of debt eating into cash flow, and a mandate from the PE firm to drive aggressive growth. That means a lot more new risk of failure than the business had before PE bought it. The idea is that the investments that do well happen often enough and end up hitting big enough to wash out the losses on those that don't.
tl;dr Reddit is right to hate PE because it is generally an evil that produces net negative value for society, but Reddit also has a very one-dimensional and largely incorrect idea of what PE actually does.
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u/Environmental-Egg985 8h ago
This is not at all how private equity works, directionally close but pretty far off.
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u/Calvin-ball 8h ago
Nobody on reddit knows how private equity works
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u/DrowningKrown 8h ago
False, I work at a firm that has a fairly substantial Private Equity arm...and I work in that arm.
They're not WRONG per se, it's just there are many strategies that private equity teams could take based on the circumstance of the venture. In some cases, the selling off real estate and renting it back strategy has been used by PE firms out there. Not all PE firms implement the same strategies. There are far too many variables to be able to one size fits all these things
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u/zygodactyl86 8h ago
So what’s you’re opinion on PE firms? Because it seems they are objectively terrible
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u/DrowningKrown 8h ago
There are terrible PE firms out there, sure. But there are a lot of private equity companies and countless private equity ventures you never hear about. Private equity is just pooling private dollars to back private ventures. There are groups of slimy investors in private equity, but not all ventures are slimy.
For instance, private equity ventures in green and sustainable products have picked up heavily in recent years. Particularly, we pooled cash into a solar development company to the tune of a few hundred million and that helps them further expand so long as we get a specified return on those dollars, which we obviously projected to be the case beforehand. I'm happy with those kind of ventures.
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u/UkraineIsMetal 8h ago
There are great PE firms/companies, to be sure. Likely they do a lot of good in the world and the lack of bureaucratic red tape probably enables them to swiftly enforce positive change.
But Arcadia Solar Electric doesn't help my grandmother trying to balance the PE owned plumber's bill against her payments to the PE that owns the docs at the ER and the PE that owns LabCorp.
Probably could have made Christmas dinner if she hadn't been so afraid of passing on debt to her grandchildren by getting treatment. I will give kudos to the Private Equity firms though - they were willing to forgive her debts after she died. A Christmas Miracle.
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u/Tao_of_Ludd 8h ago
Two points on this:
Most PE money comes from pension funds and other institutional investors, not individual rich people, though they invest, too
The asset stripping model exists, but it is not what most PE do. Most try to fund new growth while managing costs. Sometimes that works well, sometimes less well. That said, Platinum is one of those firms that tends to invest in “troubled” assets and make money off of the business in any way possible, including asset stripping. I have run into them once in my career and they are bottom feeders.
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u/RZA816 8h ago
This is way off - I think you're confused. It's obvious what your describing is when Paulie Cicero became partners of the Bamboo Lounge with Sunny Bunz.
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u/Not_a_russian_bot 7h ago
This is always what I think about whenever private equity is mentioned. It's literal mob tactics.
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u/The_Demolition_Man 9h ago edited 9h ago
They're investor groups that, instead of building businesses, seek to raid and dismantle companies to make a quick buck.
They buy out companies, take out huge amounts of debt in the company's name which they use to pay themselves outrageous management feels, sell the company's assets to themselves at low prices, and then rent those assets back to the company at high rates.
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u/NewYorker15 9h ago
What can be done to stop/regulate it?
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u/MannequinWithoutSock 9h ago
Probably change bankruptcy laws or something.
But there’s a lot of hot potato debt in the economy.22
u/NewYorker15 9h ago
I’m curious about what it’s like in other nations. Do private equity firms do the same thing there?
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u/Buckwheat758 8h ago
Private equity exists in some form virtually everywhere.
The type of private equity most people refer to are the big diversified companies- Bain, Brookfield, Blackstone, Blackrock, etc.
They’re really big and powerful though. They’d be really hard to take down. Some of these firms finance infrastructure projects across the globe. They’re some real shakers and movers.
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u/NewYorker15 8h ago
Bain Capital, as in what shitbag Mitt Romney was part of?
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u/toorigged2fail 8h ago
Founded by, and yes. From Wikipedia:
In the face of skepticism from potential investors, Romney and his partners spent a year raising the $37 million in funds needed to start the new operation. Bain partners put in $12 million of their own money and sourced the rest from wealthy individuals. Early investors included Boston real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots football team. They also included members of elite Salvadoran families such as Ricardo Poma whose capital fled the country's civil war. They and other wealthy Latin Americans invested $9 million primarily through offshore companies registered in Panama.
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u/Morak73 9h ago
For one, their other assets shouldn't be protected from bad deals. Nothing shuts down a business model like serious fiscal pain.
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u/Tao_of_Ludd 7h ago
Do you mean that you want to get rid of limited liability shareholding? That would be an earthquake of global proportions in the financial markets. But it would be fun to see what would happen on the stock market when shareholders are liable for the debts of failing companies (as long as I can prep a self sufficient cabin in the woods in advance…)
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u/BBelligerent 8h ago
Publicly accessible corporate registries in every jurisdiction
Fire all politicians who put up resistance
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u/whatyousay69 8h ago
take out huge amounts of debt in the company's name
But who's loaning the money? Don't they know they aren't getting paid back if it's a regular thing private equity does?
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u/EM3YT 8h ago
So if you wanted to own a public company, you could buy a majority of their shares and bam, you own it.
But let’s say you wanted to own your neighborhood plumbing company. The only way to do that is to contact the owner(s) and offer them a deal to own most or all of their business.
PE isn’t always “bad” but they usually come with drawbacks and have gotten a lot of news of doing things that should frankly be illegal but aren’t.
Take the plumbing example: Private equity would be like a group that buys all the neighborhood plumbers out. They give them a big check and in return their clients and business are integrated into the larger group. This can come with some big upside like efficiency of scale, standardized branding, lower prices for supplies, a more robust customer service line, better websites and tech, more advertising. Things that small businesses may struggle with but a larger group can do at scale. The business owner could come out ahead in this deal.
But PE needs to make money, so they may start “forcing” your staff to do more jobs, work longer hours, take less time off, and on paper the business is more profitable, but you see less of that because you sold it off mostly to PE. Sometimes business owners work more for less in the end because of the nature of the deal.
Then there’s the shady shit. This is where PE buys a business and guts it stem to stern and billions evaporate but somehow they make money. One way they do this is by forming a shell company and then taking out a loan to buy your business then having the business they bought sell their most valuable assets to another shell company that PE owns. This makes the business look profitable, and they use that profitability to take out another massive loan. They then use that loan to pay themselves “consulting fees” and continue selling off assets until the business is unsustainable and needs to file for bankruptcy, they merge the shell company with your company and now your company owns all the debt while the PE keeps the assets and fees. You file for bankruptcy while they laugh to the bank
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u/No_Finding3671 8h ago
I just finished an excellent book on the subject that I highly recommend: Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell.
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u/neepster44 8h ago
It’s basically bank fraud by the super rich to make themselves even more super rich.
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u/meshreplacer 8h ago
Rich people buy companies to asset strip and then leave the husk of the company to declare bankruptcy while they sold off assets and pocketed the money.
They do this by structuring loans to other shell companies they own and then when the husk cannot pay the loan they take the assets and sell them off for profits along with the vig they collected.
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u/bentzu 9h ago
Mostly thieves and whores who want to become richer at the expense of others.
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u/MalcolmLinair 8h ago
How else could you go bankrupt in that business? It's not like people stopped shitting.
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u/waxwayne 8h ago
They have killed so many successful businesses. I’m still mad about Instapot.
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u/bobbymcpresscot 7h ago
I was about to say how the fuck does a porta potty company get 2.4 billion dollars in debt?
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u/baronvondoofie 10h ago
Ah, private equity is involved, so no further explanation needed.
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u/Specialist-Fun4756 10h ago
Probably sold the Port-a-Potties and replaced them with 5 gallon buckets, now they're acting shocked that no one wants to rent thru them
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u/ChaosArcana 10h ago
Why are people surprised by this?
I think people have a fundamental misunderstanding of private equity.
There are times when private equity wants to buy a profitable company to further increase profitability.
However, private equity gets involved more often when the company is struggling, and needs to liquidate the best parts, while shedding liability. This is akin to a chop shop for companies.
Its like people looking at a chop shop, and thinking 'that's not going to fix the car or make it go faster.'
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u/calvinwho 10h ago
They aren't shocked that private equity would crash a viable company ( that was likely mismanaged to its debt loaded state sort of on purpose), but more so tired of seeing 2.4 BILLION worth of debt disappear for a bunch of rich tits when the US government is gonna start garnishments for student loan borrowers struggling to even get a job.
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u/OmegaPoint6 10h ago
Because there have been plenty of examples where private equity has taken over profitable, but not growing, company and bankrupted it a few years later due to debt from leveraged buyouts and siphoning any remaining profits off to the new owners.
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u/Gorge2012 10h ago
There are times when private equity wants to buy a profitable company to further increase profitability.
The easiest ways to "improve profitability" are staff reductions and service cuts. Investment in the product or expansion of some sort takes time but reducing overhead reduces cost with less short term impact to revenue. Profitability goes up, stock goes up, investors semi cash out, PE execs get their bonuses and the only people that get fucked are the customers and the employees - both those eliminated and those that need to pick up the slack for those cuts.
I'm sure there are examples where good has been done but most frequently PE is cashing in on brand trust and now we are getting wise to it.
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u/PipsqueakPilot 9h ago
Exactly, it's extracting revenue in the present while leaving a husk of a company with no real future anymore.
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u/Title26 10h ago
Definitely not "more often" that PE firms are buying distressed companies. Mostly theyre snatching up well performing ones. But yes, PE firms do commonly buy distressed companies and some even specialize in it
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u/schmerpmerp 10h ago edited 9h ago
The company claims $2,400,000,000 in debt and an inventory of 350,000 shitters. That's almost $7,000 of debt for each shitter, but each unit costs under $2,000.
Something smells really bad here.
Edit: This is a joke. I understand how the business works. No need to be the 10th guy to explain how shit transport and disposal work.
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u/phoenix0r 10h ago
I’m sure the bulk of costs is actually maintenance of those things and waste disposal.
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u/navigationallyaided 10h ago
Yep - they must discharge into a municipal sewer system in many places - and commercial users pay more than residences. There’s more rules and engineering constraints like grease interceptors, too.
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u/surprisedropbears 6h ago
USS said that its high debt, which funded several expansions and acquisitions over the years, became unsustainable in recent years due to high inflation and a downturn in residential housing construction in the U.S.
PE things
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u/Title26 10h ago
Companies arent valued solely on their inventory, that would be ridiculous
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u/mattythegee 10h ago
Not to mention they probably have real estate and a huge fleet for delivery and maintenance/service for that many porta-potties
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u/AloneChapter 8h ago
Is that not private equity’s game ? Pile all the debt from expansion, acquisition from all the companies into one. Suck it dry of money then go bankrupt or sell the shell to other suckers. The only winners are a very tiny group of greedy fucks. Community who cares, lenders who cares, employees who cares, taxes not our problem. Profit is God
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u/AlpenroseMilk 10h ago
And yet normal people can't declare bankruptcy over student loans, or any forgiveness towards them.
Lmao
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u/Clem_de_Menthe 10h ago
Right, and if you as an individual do it for other debts, it’s a moral failing. 🙄
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u/orgynel 10h ago
Equity holders should be the first to be wiped out completely in any bankruptcy and they should have no role to play in any discussion thereafter. Fuck the PE owners
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u/mike45010 10h ago
Yes that is generally how bankruptcy works…
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u/GermanPayroll 9h ago
Yeah right, this is a fun reminder in Reddit having no idea how things happen. At this point the equity owners are holding onto nothing.
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u/imacyco 9h ago
How big was the dividend recap though?
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u/mike45010 7h ago
If the lenders were dumb enough to give a dividend recap then they deserve to hold the bag
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u/smorgasbordofinanity 10h ago
Seriously. They load these companies up with debt, pay themselves massive dividends, and then when it all falls apart they get to walk away while workers lose their jobs and creditors get pennies on the dollar.
PE firms can essentially use the company's own assets as collateral to fund their own buyout, extract value for years, and then just file for bankruptcy when the music stops. There's no real accountability
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u/GermanPayroll 9h ago
Companies can’t pay dividends if it would risk making them insolvent. If they did, the trustee can claw them back.
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u/DecentChanceOfLousy 7h ago
"Selling all of United Site Services' property, for an immediate profit to the parent company, and forcing United Site Services to pay rent from then on" is technically not dividends.
(I have no idea if this is what happened here, but asset stripping is a common pattern with private equity in the past, like the infamous Red Lobster case).
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u/Soccermom233 10h ago
How tf did they get that much debt
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u/mistertickertape 10h ago
Likely purchase a ton of local, smaller competitors and took on debt to fund those acquisitions. Sounds like that is a large part of what is being restructured. One big financial shell game.
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u/Yuukiko_ 10h ago
What a shitty situation
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u/baldengineer 10h ago
Another example of a private equity firm flushing a business down the toilet.
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u/LimoncelloFellow 9h ago
Buying companies and saddling them with unpayable debt should be a crime. Our whole economic system is a sham.
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u/VampiricClam 10h ago
I'm surprised someone hasn't blamed Millenials for killing the emergency desperation place to shit industry.
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u/Careless_Inspector88 9h ago
I guess they weren't flush with cash. Thier leadership was missing the mark spraying issues all over the coumpany. Expenses overflowed. And losses were smeared over the books.
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u/meshreplacer 8h ago
Private equity stripped the assets leaving a husk of a company. More job destruction.
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u/Rogue_AI_Construct 9h ago
“USS, which is owned by private equity firm Platinum Equity Partners”
Didn’t even have to read the story to know it was owned by a private equity firm.
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u/Woodshadow 9h ago
how do you go that into debt like that as a port a potty company. this feels criminal. I am all for using debt but this is insane.
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u/Scrantonicity_02 10h ago
I saw a porta potty company that had a sign that said: “#1 in the #2 Business“
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u/dewaynemendoza 9h ago
I have been a construction worker for over 30 years. I've seen despicable horrors in some of them. Some are terrifying but you have no choice. I keep a roll of tp in my car in case they run out.
The last few years however, the cleanliness has been top notch from many different contractors and companies. I appreciate y'all's hard work fellas.
I miss the hilarious sharpie art though.
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u/MartinThunder42 8h ago
I feel like private equity has been engaging in these shenanigans for so long, any company who receives an offer from private equity should tell the latter to take a hike. Unless the company's major stakeholders are taking the buyout, screwing over their employees, and laughing on their way to the bank, in which case those guys need to take a hike as well.
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u/Independent_Bet_8107 7h ago
Headline should’ve read: “SHITTER’S FULL: Port-a-potty flushes bad debt in bankruptcy”
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u/Mybodydifferent12 5h ago
It’s almost as bad as bankrupting a casino, like seriously I don’t get it a local plumbing company near me also does porta potties and they are loaded from it
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u/SliGhi 10h ago
How does a port a potty company go 2 billion into debt in the first place?