Happy Valentine's Day. It is February 14th, 2026.
And I know what you're probably thinking. You're
thinking about chocolates, roses, maybe a dinner
reservation you totally forgot to make. We've
all been there. Right. But while the rest of
the world is focused on romance and relationships,
we're here to talk about a breakup. Or, maybe
more accurately, a departure. A withdrawal from
public life. It is a bit of a somber Valentine's,
isn't it? But you're right. We're looking at
a relationship that has lasted for nearly 40
years. The one between the American public, the
stock market and, well, one of the most recognizable
retail brands in history. And the thing is, as
of just two months ago, December 2025, that whole
relationship has fundamentally changed. Completely.
The ties have been severed. We are talking, of
course, about the ODP Corporation, better known
to everyone listening as Office Depot. And before
you roll your eyes and say, wait, we're doing
a deep dive on the place I buy printer cartridges,
stick with us. Please do. Because this isn't
just a story about paperclips. This is a story
about the rise of the category killer, the brutal
decades -long wars with the Federal Trade Commission,
a desperate search for identity involving Lady
Gaga and NASCAR drivers. You can't make that
part up. You really can't. And finally, a billion
-dollar exit that happened almost, you know,
in the shadows. It really is the perfect case
study for the entire life cycle of the big box
era. You've got the explosive, almost irrational
growth of the 1980s. Yeah. consolidation battles
of the 90s, then the identity crisis of the 2000s
when the internet just broke everything. And
then the final act. The final act. Yeah. Privatization.
Yeah. As of December 2025, Office Depot is no
longer a public company. It was taken private
by a firm called Atlas Holdings. And that is
our mission today. We are going to unpack this
entire 39 -year saga. We've got a stack of sources
here, everything from their original founding
documents to court transcripts from their fights
with the government and the final financial filings
from late last year. We're going to figure out
how a company goes from being a Wall Street darling
to selling itself for what looks like a discount
price. We're going to try to answer the big question.
Was this inevitable? Was the office supply super
storages? doomed the moment high speed Internet
was invented? Or were there, you know, critical
mistakes made along the way? I love was it inevitable
questions. So let's dive in. And to do that,
we have to rewind the clock. We're going way
back to 1986. Top Gun is crushing it at the box
office. The Bengals are telling us to walk like
Egyptians. And down in Florida, three guys of
Patrick Schur, Stephen Daugherty and Jack Copkin,
they have a vision. But before they start selling
pens, they were involved in something else. And
this detail, this is my absolute favorite thing
in the research stack. I have a feeling I know
exactly where you're going with this. The name
of their previous company. Please, for the record,
tell the listener what it was called. It was
called Mr. Howe Warehouse. Mr. Howe. Yes, usually
stylized in all capital letters. M -R -H -O -W.
It just sounds like a frantic question. Mr. Howe
W. Or maybe a really aggressive superhero who
fixes your plumbing. Never fear, Mr. Howe is
here. It certainly has a unique ring to it. But
while the name is amusing, the business model
is actually the key to our entire story. Mr.
Howell was a home improvement membership warehouse.
So like an early Home Depot or Lowe's. Think
of it as a precursor to that model. Yeah. Yeah.
Big industrial concrete floors, high ceilings,
pallet racking. Schur and his partners sold Mr.
Howell to a company called Service Merchandise
in 1983. But clearly that warehouse concept was
just burned into their brains. Right. So they
looked at the retail landscape in the mid -80s
and saw a huge gap. Because back then, if you
needed office supplies, how did you buy them?
Well, it was a completely bifurcated market.
I mean, totally split. If you were a massive
corporation, let's say you're General Motors
or IBM, you had a contract. You had a dedicated
distributor who delivered pallets of paper right
to your loading dock at a heavily discounted
rate. Sure. Bulk pricing. Right. But if you were
a small business, if you were a local accountant
or a lawyer or just running a flower shop, you
were kind of out of luck. You went to the local
stationery store, right? The little shop on Main
Street. Exactly. The mom and pop stationer. And
you paid the fullest price for everything. There
was no middle ground. You were basically paying
a premium for the absolute basics of doing business.
It was inefficient. So the aha moment for sure
in his team was, why don't we do for office supplies
what we did for hammers and lumber with Mr. H
.O .W.? Precisely. It's the category killer model
in its purest form. You take one specific category
of retail, you build a massive warehouse store,
you stack the inventory to the ceiling to lower
your storage costs, you cut the sales staff to
a bare minimum, and you just slash prices. You
become the only game in town. You undercut the
local shops so deeply that they just can't compete.
It's a brutal but incredibly effective strategy.
So in October 1986, they launched. The very first
Office Depot opens its doors. It's in the Lakes
Mall in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. And the response
was just electric. We often forget how revolutionary
these stores felt when they first appeared. I
mean, suddenly a small business owner could walk
in and buy a single box of pens for pretty much
the same unit price that General Motors was paying.
As a democratization of the supply closet. That's
a great way to put it. It leveled the playing
fields for small businesses in a way that had
never happened before. And the proof is just
in the sheer speed of the growth. I was looking
at the timeline and this blew my mind. They opened
store number one in October 1986. When did they
go public? December 1988. Two years. Two years
and two months. It's insane. It's a rocket ship.
Usually a company spends years, maybe a decade,
building up a track record, proving profitability,
stabilizing the model before they dare to do
an IPO. But Office Depot went from grand opening
to ticker symbol in 26 months. It just speaks
to the absolute hunger in the market for this
concept. Investors looked at that first store
and said, this is it. This works. We can put
one of these in every single strip mall in America.
It was land grab. Get big fast. That was the
entire strategy. In the late 80s, if you weren't
growing at breakneck speed, you were dying. Wall
Street rewarded growth. above all else, even
profitability sometimes. And they didn't just
grow by building new stores. They grew by eating
other fish. Correct. Which brings us to their
first really big move. By April 1991, they made
a massive strategic play. They merged with a
company called Office Club. Office Club, again
with these names, sounds very exclusive. Welcome
to the club. Right, but this was a very, very
calculated geography play. Office Depot was founded
in Florida. They had completely dominated the
East Coast and the South. Office Club was a major
player on the West Coast. So this was the missing
piece. It was the missing piece. By merging,
Office Depot didn't just get bigger. They instantly
became a truly national chain. They bridged the
gap between the Atlantic and the Pacific in one
signature on a piece of paper. So by the early
90s, they are the kings. They have the category
killer crown. They're a national powerhouse.
But as we know, the 90s were a time of globalization.
If you win America, the next logical step is
the world. Which brings us to chapter two, global
ambitions and the, what do you call the Viking
strategy? Right. They sort of dipped their toe
in the water in 1995. With Mexico. Yeah, joint
venture with a local retail giant called Grupo
Gigante. That was a pretty standard retail move
at the time. Find a local partner, leverage their
logistics and their real estate knowledge, open
stores. Smart. But not revolutionary. But the
real game changer, and the piece of history I
think is most overlooked in their story, is the
1998 acquisition of a company called Viking Direct.
This is such a critical moment. No, when I hear
Viking, I think of guys with helmets and axes,
you know, raiding the coast. But this was a different
kind of conquest. Very different. Viking Direct
wasn't a store. It was a catalog business. A
direct mail company. I remember those catalogs.
They were thick, heavy, like phone books. You'd
get them on your desk at work. You'd circle the
highlighters and the legal pads you wanted and
what you'd fax the order in. Exactly. You'd fax
it or call it in. Yeah. But think about what
a catalog business actually is from an operational
standpoint. What are its core components? It's
a list of stuff. A database of customers. It's
a massive database of customers combined with
huge centralized warehousing and a logistics
network designed to pick, pack, and ship individual
small parcels to millions of different addresses.
Wait a minute. That sounds exactly like Amazon.
It is the proto -e -commerce model. Before the
internet was the internet, catalog companies
were doing e -commerce without the E. By acquiring
Viking in 1998, Office Depot wasn't just buying
a customer list. They were buying the infrastructure
for the future of retail. That is such a smart
point, because if you're a brick -and -mortar
store, your entire logistics chain is built around
pallets. You know how to receive a truckload
of printers and put them on a shelf. You have
no idea how to put one single stapler in a box
and mail it to a guy in Leeds. You don't have
a clue. It's a totally different business. Viking
gave them that capability instantly. It allowed
them to expand into Europe and Australia without
having to build hundreds of stores. They could
just mail the catalogs and later put the catalog
online and ship everything from a central hub.
It was a capital light way to conquer the world.
It was brilliant. And it worked. They expanded
into Central America in 2001 using that Viking
brand El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica. And
for a brief shining moment in the early 2000s,
Office Depot was actually the second largest
e -commerce retailer in the world. Get out, really.
Yes, right behind Amazon. Because they simply
ported that massive Viking catalog online and
they already had the warehouses and the pick
and pack systems to fulfill the orders. That
is an absolute tragedy in hindsight. They had
the lead, they had the infrastructure, they had
everything. They did. But having the infrastructure
and having the visionary culture to pivot your
entire company are two very, very different things.
And while they were expanding globally with Viking,
they were also getting bogged down in a war at
home, a war that would define their existence
for decades. The merger wars. This is chapter
three. And this feels like a soap opera. or,
you know, a courtroom drama. It's the story of
Office Depot and Staples. The will -they -won't
-they of the corporate world. It's truly incredible.
It feels like they've been trying to get married
for 30 years and the government keeps objecting
at the wedding. That is a very, very accurate
description. And to understand the privatization
that just happened in 2025, you absolutely have
to understand what happened back in 1997. 1997,
the first attempt. The context here is just crucial.
In 1997, Office Depot and Staples were... the
two titans. They were Godzilla and King Kong.
They were just crushing the small mom and pop
shops. So they announced a merger. From a business
perspective, it made total sense. Combine operations,
close redundant stores, lower costs, increase
efficiency. But the Federal Trade Commission,
the FTC, had a slightly different view. They
did. On July 18, 1997, the FTC got a preliminary
injunction to stop the merger. Their argument
was classic antitrust. They said, if you two
merge, you will be a monopoly. You will control
the office supply market. You will raise prices
and the consumer will have nowhere else to go.
And in 1997, that was probably true, wasn't it?
I mean, Walmart wasn't huge in office supplies
yet. Amazon was just selling books out of a garage.
It was a very fair argument in 1997. The competitive
landscape was them and. Yeah. That's about it
in terms of super stores. The court agreed. The
deal was killed. OK, so they go back to their
corners. They compete. They fight it out for
another. what, 18 years? An entire generation.
But then, fast forward to 2015, the world is
completely different. We have iPhones. We have
high -speed internet. Amazon is the everything
store. You can buy a desk on Wayfair. You can
buy pallets of paper at Costco. Staples looks
at Office Depot and says, hey, let's try this
again. The market has completely changed. We
aren't the predators anymore. We're the prey.
It's a desperation move. Staples offers $6 .3
billion cash in stock. A massive deal. And their
argument to the FTC this time is totally different.
It's look around. Look at Amazon. If you don't
let us merge, Amazon is going to kill us both.
We need this merger to survive. It seems like
a slam dunk argument. Any rational person looking
at the retail landscape in 2015 would say, yeah,
these guys aren't a monopoly. They're dinosaurs
trying to bundle up against the coming ice age.
So what should the FTC do? They blocked it again.
Unbelievable. Why? I mean, how could they possibly
argue that Amazon didn't matter? Okay. This is
where we have to get a little technical, but
it's absolutely fascinating. Yeah. The FTC used
a very, very specific and some would say outdated
definition of the market. They didn't look at
retail consumers, people like you and me, buying
a pack of pens. Okay. They looked exclusively
at B2B contract customers. Explain that distinction.
What does that mean? Okay. So if you're a Fortune
500 company. Let's say you're Boeing or Coca
-Cola. You don't buy your paper from Amazon .com.
You need a contract. You need a dedicated supplier
who can deliver to 500 different locations nationwide,
provide detailed spending reports for your accounting
department, manage inventory levels, and guarantee
a fixed price on toner for the next three years.
Right. It's a much more complex sale. It's a
massive, complex enterprise relationship. And
in 2015, the FTC argued that Amazon business
just wasn't mature enough to handle those kinds
of massive, complex corporate contracts. They
argued that only Staples and Office Depot have
the national logistics and sales infrastructure
to serve the Fortune 500. So their argument was
if they merge, Coca -Cola would have no choice
and would get price gouged. Exactly. The government's
whole case was about protecting the biggest companies
in the world. They essentially said. We don't
care about the small businesses or the regular
consumers who have infinite choice online. We
only care about this one tiny slice of the market
where you two are the only players. A district
court judge bought that argument. A judge agreed
in May 2016. The injunction was granted. The
deal died on the vine for the second time. That
has to be one of the most frustrating moments
in modern business history, to be told you're
a dangerous monopoly while you're literally watching
your customers walk out the door to a digital
competitor that the government refuses to acknowledge.
It was a fatal blow. It was a strategic death
sentence. It meant they were trapped. They couldn't
scale up to fight Amazon, but they couldn't grow
organically because the retail market was shrinking.
They were stuck in a cage built by the FTC. And
when you can't marry the one you love, you. You
settle. That brings us to chapter four, the merger
that worked, the OfficeMax deal. Right. In 2013,
so this is just before that second failed Staples
attempt, Office Depot merged with the number
three player OfficeMax. This was pitched as the
merger of equals. But I remember some Wall Street
analysts at the time called it two drunks trying
to hold each other up. Ouch. That's brutal. It's
harsh, but you can see the logic. It was a purely
defensive move. They completed the deal in November
2013, but it wasn't a celebration. There were
no champagne corks popping. It was a triage operation.
So what happened after the ink dried on that
deal? Massive, painful closures. By May 2014,
just six months later, they announced they were
closing 400 stores. 400 stores, that's a huge
number. That's a lot of empty real estate and
a lot of lost jobs. It was absolutely necessary.
Because of the merger, you had absurd situations
where an Office Depot and an Office Max were
literally across the street from each other in
the same strip mall, fighting for the same diminishing
pool of customers. They had to cannibalize their
own footprint just to stop the bleeding. So the
regulatory environment is hostile. The retail
footprint is shrinking. And this leads to what
I call the identity crisis era, the mid -2000s
and 2010s, where they just seem completely lost.
This is where the story gets, well, colorful
is a good word for it. We have to talk about
the partnerships, because when I look at this
list, I see a company that is just throwing spaghetti
at the wall to see what sticks. Let's start with
NASCAR. Ah, yes. In 2005, Office Depot became
the official office products partner of NASCAR.
Which is a mouthful of a title. It really is.
They sponsored the hashtag 99 Ford Fusion, driven
by Carl Edwards, the guy who was famous for doing
backflips off his car when he won. I remember
him. And then later, starting 2009, they sponsored
a huge name. Tony Stewart, smoke in the hashtag
14 Chevy. Now, help me understand the logic here.
I get that NASCAR has a massive loyal audience.
But when I think of NASCAR sponsorships, I think
of, you know, beer, motor oil, maybe power tools.
I don't immediately think Manila folders. It
does seem like a weird mismatch on the surface.
But think about the demographic. Who watches
NASCAR? A lot of tradespeople, independent contractors,
plumbers, electricians, mechanics, small business
owners. The guy who runs a local HVAC repair
service out of his truck. OK, I see it now. That
guy needs invoices. He needs printer ink. He
needs a new chair for his home office where he
does the books at night. It was a very clever
play for the blue collar small business owner.
A market that maybe staples with its more corporate
feel was ignoring. Exactly. And for a while,
it seemed to work. It solidified their brand
as a practical place for the working man's business.
But then they took a hard left turn. A very,
very hard left turn. In September 2012, they
announced they're not renewing with Tony Stewart.
And then just two months later, they announced
a new partner. From Tony Stewart to Lady Gaga.
Yes. In November 2012, they announced a partnership
with Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation. I
mean, talk about whiplash. You go from the grandstands
of Daytona to the Little Monsters. It's two completely
different universes. It is. They started selling
these limited edition office supplies, you know,
notebooks, pens, where 25 % of the earnings went
to the foundation. They had these things that
they called bravery bracelets. Bravery bracelets
at Office Depot. It just screams of desperation,
doesn't it? It signals a boardroom that is absolutely
terrified that they're becoming irrelevant and
losing the next generation. They probably looked
at their demographic data, saw that their average
customer was like 55 years old, and panicked.
Total panic. How do we get the millennials in
the door? I don't know. Lady Gaga is popular
with the kids. Let's do that. But it feels so
inauthentic. And customers are smart. They can
smell inauthenticity a mile away. You can't just
slap a pop star's name on a highlighter and suddenly
become cool. It highlights the lack of a core
identity. Were they the NASCAR store for contractors?
Were they the social justice store for millennials?
Were they a B2B logistics company? They were
trying to be everything to everyone, which usually
means you end up being nothing to anyone. But
to give them credit, they did eventually find
a partnership that made a lot more sense. In
July 2020, they partnered with Canva. Now that
is a logical fit. That one makes sense. Canva
is this huge online design tool for the gig economy,
for small businesses, for creators. Right. You
design your flyer or your new business card on
Canva's website. And then you click a button
and you send it to be printed at your local office
depot. That integrates perfectly into the modern
workflow. It's a smart, seamless connection.
It acknowledges that people don't just need raw
materials anymore. They need finished products.
Which leads us to the next big chapter in their
story. The pivot that was supposed to save them.
the pivot to services and technology. This has
been the drumbeat from their leadership for the
last 10 years at least. We are not a retailer.
We are a services provider. It started in a huge
way in 2017 when they bought a company called
CompuCom. A billion -dollar acquisition. This
was a massive bet. And the goal was actually
fascinating. They wanted to become the IT department
for small and medium -sized businesses. I like
that concept. If I run a bakery with three locations,
I don't have an IT guy on staff. If my point
-of -sale system crashes during the morning rush,
I'm in huge trouble. Exactly. Office Depot wanted
to be the one you called. They would send a technician,
a geek squad. style person though that's a best
buy term to fix your network manage your software
updates handle your cyber security it's a sticky
relationship buying a pen is a one -time transaction
fixing my server every month is a long -term
relationship and relationships have much higher
margins you make pennies on a pen you can make
50 margins on i .t services it was a move to
get away from low margin products and into high
margin services they also bought a company called
buyer quest in january 2021 yeah that's another
piece of puzzle. It's enterprise procurement
software. Again, trying to embed themselves deeper
in the workflow of their corporate customers,
making it harder for those customers to leave.
And while they were doing all this high -tech
services stuff, they were also really boosting
their own products. The private labels. We have
to mention TUL. PUL. The pens. The legendary
TUL pens. Listen, people are obsessed with these
pens. There are online forums dedicated to them.
I have friends who will not write with anything
else. It is a massive, massive success story
for them. It's a cult product. And it's a perfect
example of why private labels are so important,
along with their other brands like Ativa and
Real Space Furniture. Explain the economics of
that. Why is a private label so much better for
them? It's simple. If you go into Office Depot
and buy a box of Bic pens, Office Depot makes
a small margin, but Bic makes the real profit.
If you go in and buy a box of TUL pens, Office
Depot keeps almost all the profit. They control
the design, the manufacturing cost, everything.
It's a much more profitable sale. So on paper,
it seems like they're doing the right things.
They're pivoting to high margin services. They're
building successful private label brands. They're
even getting elite gold certifications for their
buildings. We saw they built a green store in
Austin way back in 2008. But there was a very
dark side to the service pivot. Chapter seven,
the scandal. The PC health check. This makes
me angry just reading about it. It should, because
it was a fundamental breach of trust that undermined
their entire services strategy. So lay it out
for us. What exactly happened? In March of 2019,
Office Depot and a partner company they used
called Support .com agreed to pay a total of
$35 million to settle allegations from the Federal
Trade Commission. The FTC again. They just cannot
shake these guys. They really can't. The allegation
was that they were running a scam in their stores.
They offered a free PC health check. You bring
in your computer. Maybe it's running a little
slow. They plug in a piece of software. And the
FTC alleged that this software was basically
rigged. It was designed to falsely claim it found
malware symptoms or infections, even on perfectly
clean, brand new computers. So it was a lie.
It was a scare tactic to sell services. That
was the allegation, yes. The software would pop
up a scary red box with a warning, and the store
associate would say, oh no, you have a serious
virus. But don't worry, for $300, our tech service
can fix it for you. That is just predatory. And
think about who brings a computer into a store
for a checkup. It's not the tech -savvy 20 -year
-old who built their own PC. It's the grandmother
who's worried she clicked on a bad link. It's
the person who doesn't know better and trusts
the expert in the red shirt. It's exploiting
the most vulnerable customers. And that's why
it was so incredibly damaging. Think about it.
They were spending a billion dollars on CompuCom
to rebrand themselves as a trusted IT advisor.
And at the exact same time, their own stores
were getting busted for scamming customers with...
fake virus scans. You cannot build a service
business without trust. It's the only currency
you have. It poisoned the well. Completely. How
could any small business owner sign a million
dollar IT contract with him after reading that
headline? So trust is eroded. The big mergers
were blocked. The retail footprint is shrinking.
And the stock price is just flatlining for years.
Which brings us to the end. Chapter 8. The final
chapter of public independence. Let's look at
the financial autopsy. We have the numbers from
the 2024 annual report, which was the last one
they filed as a public company. Okay, shoot me
with them. What was the top line? Revenue for
the full year 2024, $6 .99 billion. Okay, so
nearly $7 billion. That still sounds like a massive
company. That's not a small business. It is.
That's a lot of revenue. But as they say, revenue
is vanity, profit is sanity. So let's look at
the bottom line. What was the net income? Negative
$3 million. A loss. They sold $7 billion worth
of goods and services, paid their employees,
paid their rent on almost 1 ,000 stores, paid
their suppliers, and at the end of the year,
they were $3 million in the hole. That is the
definition of a treadmill. You are running as
fast as you can just to stay in the same place,
or in this case, to slide backward just a little
bit. It's completely unsustainable. And that
explains the razor thin, or in this case, negative
margins, the operating costs of maintaining all
that retail real estate, the corporate overhead,
the debt from the acquisitions. It was a business
model that just wasn't working anymore as a public
company. Wall Street demands growth. If you aren't
growing and you aren't profitable, you're dead
money. So the sharks began to circle. And in
this case, the shark was a private equity firm
called Atlas Holdings. Enter the buyout. In September
2025, the agreement was announced. By December
2025, just two months ago from when we're recording,
it was all done. The deal was closed. And the
final Bryce tag. It was completed at approximately
$1 billion. I want to pause on that number for
a second. A company with $7 billion in sales
sells for $1 billion. That ratio seems incredibly
low. It's a distress valuation. It's about 0
.15 times revenue. In the tech world, healthy
companies sell for 10 or 20 times their revenue.
Even in traditional retail, you'd expect a better
multiple than that. This price tells you exactly
what the market thought of their future. Which
was not much. That the ODP Corporation had zero
growth potential. Atlas Holdings didn't buy it
for the future. They bought it for the existing
cash flow and the assets they could sell off.
So as of right now, Valentine's Day 2026, there
is no more ODP ticker symbol on the Nasdaq. It's
just gone. It is a private company. They have
a new CEO named Craig Gunkel, who was appointed
in December as soon as the deal closed. And what
do they have left to work with? What's the state
of the company today? They still have about 19
,000 employees and they still have a retail footprint
of roughly 922 stores. So for the listener wondering,
is my local office depot going to close down
now? What's the likely answer? The answer is
probably some of them will. Yes. Privatization
is almost always a prelude to a serious deep
restructuring. Why is that? When you're a public
company, you're terrified of closing stores because
it's a negative headline. It looks like you're
shrinking and Wall Street punishes you for it.
The stock price drops when you're private. You
don't care about the stock price. You only care
about profitability and cash flow. No more quarterly
earnings calls to apologize for. Exactly. Atlas
Holdings can now make the hard, painful cuts
that the public markets wouldn't tolerate. I
would bet they're looking at those 922 stores
right now, identifying the 200 or 300 that are
losing the most money, and they'll shut them
down immediately to stop the cash bleed. So we
can expect a smaller retail footprint and probably
a harder pivot toward that B2B distribution model,
the CombiCom and BuyerQuest side of the business,
the boring stuff. The boring but profitable stuff,
yeah. I think you'll see a slow managed retreat
from consumer retail. It really feels like the
end of the Mr. Howe dream, doesn't it? The original
vision of a giant warehouse where everyone is
welcome is turning into a focused logistics company
just for corporate accounts. It's a return to
the mean. The category killer era was a very
specific moment in time, fueled by cheap real
estate, cheap capital, and a complete lack of
internet competition. That moment is over. Now,
before we sign off, I have a theory. A deep dive
conspiracy theory, if you will. Oh, I'm intrigued.
Go on. OK, so we spent a good chunk of this show
talking about how the government repeatedly refused
to let Office Depot and Staples merge because
they were these two public giants. But look at
the chessboard now. Staples was taken private
back in 2017. A firm called Sycamore Partners
bought them. Right. And now Office Depot is private.
Atlas Holdings owns them. They are both operating
in the shadows of private equity. No public reports.
No SEC filings to scrutinize. No shareholder
votes. I see exactly where you're going with
this. Does this finally open the door? Can they
just merge now? Can the CEOs of Atlas and Sycamore
have lunch, shake hands in a dark room, and finally
combine these two companies now that nobody's
really watching? It is the billion -dollar question,
isn't it? Technically, being a private company
doesn't make you immune to antitrust laws. The
FTC can still investigate and sue private companies.
However. There's a big however. There's a huge
however. Yeah. Without the intense public scrutiny,
without the media circus that surrounds a public
merger announcement, it is so much easier to
coordinate. Coordination, not a formal merger.
Maybe. Maybe they don't formally merge into one
company called Staples Depot. But maybe they
just quietly divide the map. You take all the
corporate contracts west of the Mississippi,
we'll take the east. Or. We'll share our procurement
networks to lower costs from suppliers. It allows
for a level of collusion or cooperation that
is simply impossible when you're two public companies
fighting for stock market supremacy. The war
might finally be over, not because one side won,
but because they both got bought by new owners
who decided to stop fighting and just survive
in the dark. Or perhaps they just realized that
fighting each other was completely pointless
when a third party named Amazon had already won
the war years ago. That is a very sobering thought.
It is what it is. Well, that brings us to the
end of our journey. We've gone from the optimistic
dream of a Mr. Howell warehouse in 1986 to a
billion -dollar private equity exit in 2025.
We've seen the rise, the falls, the blocked weddings
at the altar, the NASCAR cars, the Lady Gaga
bracelets, and the final withdrawal from public
view. It really is a monument to the last 40
years of American retail. A true case study.
So the next time you drive past an office depot,
take a look at that red and white sign. It's
not just a store. It's a survivor. And somewhere,
Mr. Howe W. is watching and probably scratching
his head. Long live Mr. Howe W. Thanks for listening
to The Deep Dive. We'll catch you on the next
one.