A few months ago, when Mervyn’s department stores was closing for good, we saw a thing on the news with the actual Mervyn himself decrying the fall of his company, which he had sold 20+ years before. Apparently Mervyn himself was a canny character, and he decided to avoid one of the pitfalls of retail businesses: he always owned his own stores. I don’t mean the businesses, I mean the real estate and the structures that are built on it. Guess who the new owner of Mervyn’s was, eventually? You guessed it, Cerberus Capital. Care to guess what they did with Mervyn’s? They sold the physical stores to another entity they owned, a real estate holding company. I didn’t see the sale price during the broadcast, but the rent the company was charged for occupying buildings it used to actually own put Mervyn’s out of business. Then Cerberus (pretty much in the same month) asked the taxpayers for a bailout of Chrysler. Cute, isn’t it?
