[Brian Griffin]

“K-Mart and Sears...real estate” was clearly poorly used.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

There are numerous stories where a company starts to struggle. It may be because they truly are run poorly or their brand no longer holds any cachet. Someone comes along who tells that company there is hope if they go private, merge with another company, etc. That process requires putting on a lot of debt.

The people involved in the financial transaction make out like bandits. The company now has a worse problem: they are still unsuccessful, but now they have a huge amount of debt to pay off so they don't have the funds for a real turnaround.

The company goes bankrupt, but just later than it probably should.

If people stopped shopping at K-Mart and Sears because they were no longer cool or because they attracted the "wrong type of shopper", and that was a curse they would never be able to overcome, then they probably should have just gone out of business.

Instead vultures were able to feed off the dying corpse with no consequences.