The smell. That is the first thing that hits
me when I look at this topic. It's a very specific
sensory memory. Oh, I know exactly what you're
talking about. You walk through those automatic
sliding doors, the blast of industrial air conditioning
hits you, and you are immediately just assaulted
by the scent of, what was it, cinnamon brooms?
Synthetic vanilla. It was definitely potpourri.
And maybe a hint of fresh cotton sheets that
have been sitting in plastic packaging for...
You know, six months. Yes. It's a very distinct
olfactory cocktail. That's the one. Today, we
are going back to a place that, for a solid two
decades, really defined the suburban weekend
for millions of people. I mean, if you needed
a towel, a spatula, or a gadget to slice an avocado
that you would absolutely never use. Oh, you
had to have the avocado slicer. This was the
place. We were talking about linens and things.
It's a name that feels like a time capsule now,
doesn't it? It just conjures up these images
of beige walls and endless, endless aisles. It
really does. But before we write it off as just
another nostalgia trip, we have to look at the
sheer scale of this operation. This wasn't just
some mom -and -pop shop. At its peak, this was
a retail empire. The numbers in the source material
are actually staggering when you look at them.
We are talking about 571 stores. 571. That is
a massive footprint. They were in 47 U .S. states
and six Canadian provinces. And the workforce,
too. They employed over 7 ,300 people as of late
2006. That is the size of a small town's population
just on their payroll. Exactly. So the mission
for this deep dive isn't just to, you know, reminisce
about... buying shower curtains, is to figure
out how something that big something that generated
nearly $3 billion a year just evaporates. Well,
it didn't just evaporate, though, and I think
that is the key. It was dismantled. This is a
classic, almost tragic case study of the American
category killer. Okay, that term category killer,
we're going to get into that. We will. Because
you see the full life cycle here. You see the
scrappy family founded beginning, the explosion
into a corporate behemoth, the private equity
takeover, and then this strange modern phenomenon,
the zombie afterlife. That term zombie brand
is something we are going to spend some time
on later because it is fascinating and frankly
a little dystopian. It really is. But let's start
at the beginning. Because for a story that became
synonymous with big box retail, the origin story
is surprisingly... Well, small. It's incredibly
humble. And to understand it, you have to kind
of place yourself in the retail landscape of
the late 1950s. It was a totally different world.
Right. We're talking 1958 specifically. Exactly.
So in November of 1958, you have a man named
Eugene Wallace Culkin. Now, Culkin didn't wake
up one day and decide to build a massive superstore.
The concept of a superstore didn't really even
exist in the way we think of it now. Right. He
started with something called Least Linen Department.
OK, pause there. Least Linen Department. I feel
like we don't see this model as much anymore,
or maybe we just don't notice it. How exactly
did that work? It's actually a very clever, really
low risk way to enter retail. Imagine a large
discount chain. In this case, the source says
it was a store called Great Eastern Mills in
New Jersey. Great Eastern Mills. They sell everything,
but they don't necessarily want to manage the
inventory and the logistics for every single
category. I mean, it's a huge headache to source
towels and sheets if your main business is, say,
dry goods or hardware. So they basically outsource
the headache. Precisely. They let an outside
expert, in this case Kalkin, come in and rent
space. He's basically a tenant operating inside
their store. A store within a store. I see that
now sometimes with, like, Sephora inside a Kohl's
or something. That's the modern equivalent, exactly.
He rents a corner of the floor plan. He brings
his own sheets, his own towels, his own staff.
He pays Great Eastern Mills either a cut of the
sales or a flat rent, and he keeps the profit.
And he doesn't have to build a building. He doesn't
have to pay for the parking lot lights or the
security guard at the front door. He just sells
linens. He's just selling linens. It's a parasite
model, but in the best possible business sense.
He's drafting off the foot traffic that the bigger
store already generates. Symbiotic is probably
the term they'd use in business school. Symbiotic,
yes. A much kinder term. But it allowed him to
test the market without this massive capital
expenditure. And he did this for a long time.
The source points out he established this department
in 1958, but the first actual store with the
name Linens and Things on the sign didn't open
until August 1970. Wow, that's 12 years. That
is a long incubation period. It really is. He
spent over a decade perfecting his product assortment,
understanding the customer, and saving up capital.
And even when that first store opened in East
Brunswick, New Jersey, the wording in the history
is very specific. It says Great Eastern Mills
opened the first store. So he was still operating
under the umbrella of this larger parent company.
Right. A company called Dalen Inc. And that turned
out to be a really dangerous place to be because
the 1970s, I mean, they were just brutal economically.
We talk about inflation now, but the 70s were
a graveyard for retailers. A total mess. Stagflation,
high interest rates. And Dalen Inc. was one of
the casualties. So in 1975, the host body dies.
Dalen went bankrupt. So. This is the moment of
truth for Culkin, right? His landlord, his corporate
parent, essentially, is going out of business.
The ship he's been sailing on for 17 years is
sinking from under him. Most people would have
just packed up their towels and gone home. But
Culkin did something very bold. He looked at
the wreckage of Dalen Inc. and saw seven locations
of his concept that were actually working. He
realized that while the parent company was failing,
his specific linen concept was still totally
viable. So he bought them out of the bankruptcy.
Correct. He extracted those seven units and incorporated
linens and things, ink, as a completely independent
entity. This is the moment, 1975, where the company
truly begins its life as we knew it. It's no
longer just a department. It's a chain. I love
that pivot. It's the classic Phoenix rising from
the ashes moment in a business story. It really
is. And once he had control, he didn't waste
any time. The source says they went from those
seven salvage stores in 1975 to 55 stores by
1983. Which for that era is incredibly rapid
scaling. You have to remember, this is all pre
-internet. Scaling meant physically finding real
estate, negotiating leases, setting up distribution,
physically stocking warehouses, hiring managers.
A huge logistical upgrade. It's massive. So going
from 7 to 55 in eight years is incredibly aggressive
growth. It just proves that the core concept
specialty home goods at a discount was really
resonating with the American public. But 1983
marks the end of what you could call the founder
era, doesn't it? It does. And this is the first
major lesson in our case study, the liquidity
event. Kalkin builds this successful reach. Melville
Corporation. That just sounds like one of those
faceless conglomerates that owns everything from,
I don't know, shoe stores to pharmacies. And
you're not wrong. They were a massive player
at the time. To give you some context, they owned
CVS. They owned Marshalls at one point, KB Toys.
They were a huge portfolio holder. So for Lenin's
and things, this meant access to some really
deep pockets. Exactly. They were no longer just
a successful independent chain. They were now
a corporate asset with serious capital behind
them, ready to be scaled up on a national level.
And that capital is what fueled the next phase.
This is the era I really remember, the Superstore
Wars. The late 80s and the 90s, the golden era
of the category killer. Can we define that term
category killer? It sounds so violent. It is
violent, economically speaking. A category killer
is a specialty retailer that focuses on one single
category of goods like tools for toys are us,
electronics for Best Buy, or in this case, home
goods for linens and things. And they offer such
a massive selection and such deep inventory at
low prices that no small independent store can
possibly compete. They just overwhelm them. They
kill the category for everyone else. Your local
mom and pop shop on Main Street might have, you
know, three types of toasters. You walk into
Linens and Things and they had an entire aisle
of toasters, every brand, every color. You go
there because you know they will have what you're
looking for. It becomes a destination. It does.
And the architect of this phase for Linens and
Things was a guy named Norman Axelrod. He became
CEO in 1989. And he is the one who really pushed
the big box superstore format that we all remember.
This is when they moved out of the smaller mall
stores or strip centers and into those giant
standalone boxes with the ridiculously high ceilings.
Yes. The strategy was destination shopping. They
didn't need to be in the mall anymore. They were
the reason you got in your car and left the house.
But they weren't the only ones doing this. You
absolutely cannot tell this story without mentioning
the other guy, the one with the blue logo. Bed
Bath & Beyond. The arch nemesis. They were the
Coke and Pepsi of home goods, no question. And
the source explicitly mentions that they were
locked in a race for locations. This was a full
-on land grab. It's true. If you drive through
suburban America, even today, you will often
see them right across the street from each other
in the same power center. That was not an accident.
Not at all. They were fighting tooth and nail
for the same customer base. Usually that upper
middle class suburban night who was decorating
a new home or, you know, setting up a wedding
registry. It brings up an interesting question
about differentiation, though, because to me
as a shopper, they felt. almost identical inside.
Did the source highlight any real differences
in how they operated or how they tried to position
themselves? It's subtle, but yes. Bed Bath &
Beyond became famous, almost infamous, for their
coupon strategy. The big blue postcard. The big
blue 20 % off coupon that never expired. People
hoarded them in their glove compartment. My mom
had a stack of them. Everyone's mom had a stack.
Linens and things, especially in the later years
under Axelrod, tried to focus more on an everyday
low price model. That's the Walmart model, basically.
It is. The idea is you don't need a coupon to
get a good deal here. We're just always offering
a fair price. They also tried to position themselves
as having slightly more high end curated brands.
But as we'll see, sticking to that strategy gets
really difficult when you have shareholders breathing
down your neck. And speaking of shareholders,
that brings us to 1996. The IPO. The initial
public offering. Melville Corporation, the parent
company, reorganized. It became CVS Corporation,
and they decided to spin off linens and things
as its own independent, publicly traded company.
Which means now they have to answer to Wall Street.
They have quarterly earnings calls. And that
relentless, insatiable demand for growth. You
can't just be profitable. You have to be more
profitable than you were three months ago. The
stock market does not like a flat line, even
if it's a profitable flat line. And for a while,
they really delivered on that. I mean, let's
look at the peak. The source cites the numbers
from 2005, which was really their zenith. The
peak performance year. In 2005, revenue hit $2
.7 billion. $2 .7 billion. That is a lot of shower
curtains and bath mats. It is a massive volume
of goods, and the source defines their business
strategy very clearly at this point. They wanted
to offer a, quote, high -quality, brand -name
home furnishings at exceptional everyday values.
There's that key phrase again, everyday values.
It implies a strategy of consistency, not relying
on sales gimmicks, but being a reliable place
for good value. And the other part of the strategy
was maintaining low operating costs. So, you
know, run a lean and mean operation, sell billions
of dollars of goods. It seemed to be working
perfectly. If you froze time in 2005, you'd say
this is a bulletproof business. They had fought
the superstore wars. They had a huge market share.
It looked like they'd won. But then comes 2006.
And this is section three of our story, the private
equity pivot. This feels like the moment where
the music in the movie changes from a major key
to a very ominous minor key. It absolutely is
the turning point. In February 2006, the company
is acquired by Apollo Global Management. Apollo
Global Management. That sounds serious. They're
one of the heavyweights. They are. One of the
biggest names in private equity. And the price
tag for this deal was $1 .3 billion. So this
is a fundamental structural change for the company.
They go from being a public company where you
or I could look up their stock price every day
to a private owned business, specifically a limited
partnership. OK, we need to break this down for
the listener because you hear the term private
equity and it can just sound like jargon. What
does this actually mean for the store on the
ground? When a firm like Apollo buys a company
like Linens and things, they aren't usually buying
it with a suitcase full of cash they have lying
around, right? Rarely, if ever. This is usually
done through a financial maneuver called a leveraged
buyout, or an LBO. Can you explain that like
I'm 5? Or maybe like I'm 12? I'll try. Imagine
you want to buy a house that costs a million
dollars. You only have $100 ,000 in cash, so
you go to a bank and you borrow the other $900
,000. You buy the house. Okay, simple enough.
But here's the trick. In a corporate LBO, you
don't pay that $900 ,000 mortgage from your own
salary. You make the house pay the mortgage.
So the company, Linens and Things, suddenly ends
up on the hook for the massive debt that was
just used to buy it. In many cases, yes. That's
the burden the source refers to later on. The
debt from the acquisition is placed onto the
company's own balance sheet. Suddenly, Linens
and Things isn't just trying to sell enough towels
to pay for the lights and the staff and the inventory.
They have to sell enough towels to service this
massive new interest payment every single month.
That seems... Incredibly risky. It works if the
economy keeps booming. It works if you can find
new ways to cut costs and increase efficiency
to generate more cash. But it leaves you with
absolutely zero margin for error. It's like driving
a race car at 200 miles per hour. If the track
is perfectly straight and smooth, you're fine.
But if there is one bump in the road... You crash.
And we know some bumps who are coming in the
economy. But even before that, you see an immediate
leadership shakeup. Right. Norman Axelrod, the
guy who built the Superstore empire for over
a decade, leaves. He's out. And in comes a new
team. Robert or Bob DeNicola. As CEO. You also
have F. David Coder as president and Omer Fancy
as EVP of marketing. New team, new playbook.
And the source highlights a very, very specific
change in strategy under this new Apollo ownership.
They moved away from that everyday low price
model that we just talked about. Yes. They pivoted
to, and I'm quoting here. splashy clearance sales
and product promotions. Okay, but why? If the
other model was so successful for so long, why
change it? I think it comes down to one word.
Cash. When you have a massive debt payment due
every quarter, you need cash now. And splashy
clearance sales are a great way to drive a quick
burst of revenue. It's like a sugar rush for
the balance sheet. But it's a dangerous game.
You get that short term spike in sales. But in
the long term, you train your customers to never,
ever pay full price again. They just wait for
the next 50 percent off everything sale. It completely
erodes the brand's perception of value. Instead
of being a place for high quality everyday values,
it becomes a place for cheap stuff that's on
sale right now. It's a fundamental shift. So
we have new owners, a new CEO, a new strategy
and a mountain of new debt. Let's fast forward
just a year and a half. We are now in late 2007.
This is Section 4 of the outline, the financial
unraveling. We have a real snapshot here from
their SEC filing the form 10Q for the quarter
that ended on September 29, 2007. This document
is like a health checkup for the company right
before the illness becomes terminal. OK, so what
did the numbers look like? Well, net sales were
$666 .8 million. Now, interestingly, that was
actually up slightly from the previous year,
which was $658 .2 million. OK, so sales are up.
On the surface, that sounds good, right? If I'm
a casual observer, I see the line going up and
I think things are OK. You would think so. But
this is where you have to look behind the headline
number. You have to look at the why. And the
expert analysis, which the source of material
includes, clarifies that sales only went up because
they had opened new stores in that time. Ah,
I see. So the total amount of money coming in
is bigger, but it doesn't mean the individual
stores are actually healthy. Exactly. It's artificial
growth. And that is where the key metric, contrable
store sales, comes in. For the stores that were
open for at least a year, that number actually
declined. So the existing stores were making
less money than they did the year before. That's
the real health indicator. That's the indicator.
And here is the really concerning part from that
report. The source explicitly attributes that
decline to fewer customer transactions. Ouch.
People just weren't walking in the doors often.
Fewer people were coming in. Now, the average
transaction value did increase a little bit,
meaning the people who did come in spent a bit
more. Maybe they were buying more because of
those splashy sales. But you cannot sustain a
retail business, especially a category killer
that relies on huge volume if your foot traffic
is dropping off a cliff. That's a five alarm
fire. And meanwhile, while the sales are getting
shaky. The losses are just piling up. This is
where that debt burden we discussed becomes undeniable.
The source says it plainly. The company was burdened
with debt after private equity buyouts. Let's
look at the specific loss numbers for that one
quarter, the quarter ending in September 2007.
The operating loss was $56 .6 million. The year
before, in the same quarter, It was only a $17
.9 million loss. Wow. That is a huge jump in
the operating loss. It's massive. And then when
you look at the net loss, which is the bottom
line after you factor in interest payments on
that debt and taxes, it was $79 .9 million lost
in just three months. compared to 27 .4 million
lost the prior year. So the loss is nearly tripled
in one year. Tripled. When you see a trend line
like that, losses accelerating while your core
customer traffic is declining, it is a flashing
red light on the dashboard. They were burning
cash way faster than they could possibly bring
it in. And that brings us to 2008, the year of
the collapse. And it really feels like it happened
incredibly fast. It did. The unraveling was just
rapid. Section 5 of our deep dive starts with
the first public warning signs in April of 2008.
The New York Post reported rumors that Linens
and Things was trying to sell off its Canadian
division. And from what I understand, the Canadian
division was actually pretty profitable. It was.
That's the irony. In a lot of these cross -border
retail bankruptcies, the Canadian arms are actually
healthier. The competition landscape is different
up there. So they were trying to sell off the
one healthy part of the business to save the
rest. It seemed so. But the company, officially,
refused to confirm the sale rumors. They would
only admit that they had hired an advisor to
look into strategic alternatives. Strategic alternatives.
That is the most notorious piece of corporate
jargon. It's code for help. We are drowning and
looking for any lifeline we can find. Pretty
much, yes. It means they're looking to sell,
find a merger partner, anything to avoid the
inevitable. And they didn't find a solution fast
enough. The timeline here is brutal. Just a few
weeks later, May 2, 2008. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy
filing. And the immediate impact of that filing
was closing 120 stores. Just like that. That's
roughly 20 % of their entire fleet gone overnight.
Now, I want to clarify something for the listener
because it's an important distinction. Chapter
11 doesn't always mean the end of the road, right?
That's a great point. It's not liquidation. Not
yet. Right. Airlines file for Chapter 11 all
the time and keep flying. It's a reorganization.
The goal is to hit pause on your debt payments,
renegotiate with your creditors, and hopefully
come out leaner and stronger on the other side.
And they really, really try to do that. In August
of 2008, they devised a plan to emerge from bankruptcy.
It's clear that the management team at this point
realized that the Apollo strategy wasn't working.
The splashy sales strategy. Exactly. They wanted
to reverse that entirely. The plan was to go.
Back to basics. It sounds like a corporate confession.
OK, we messed up. Let's go back to what actually
worked in 2005. That's exactly what it was. They
wanted to stop the constant clearance sales and
return to the everyday low price model that had
built the company. They also wanted to improve
the quality of their merchandise. And this is
a crucial detail. Keep the shelves properly stocked.
Which implies that during the financial trouble,
they were having problems paying their suppliers,
so the shelves were getting empty. And that is
a death spiral in retail. It's the absolute worst
thing. A customer walks in, sees empty shelves,
and they don't just not buy something that day.
They don't come back next time. So they tried
to undo the damage of the last two years, but
the timing was just catastrophic. As I noted
in the intro. It feels like it was too little,
way too late. It was. You simply cannot pivot
a ship that large that quickly when you are already
in bankruptcy court. And you have to consider
the broader context. This is August 2008. The
global financial crisis is knocking on the door.
Hard. Lehman Brothers is about to collapse in
a few weeks. The entire global economy is on
the verge of crashing. Credit markets were completely
frozen. In a normal economy, maybe, and it's
a big maybe, someone lends them the money they
need to restart. But in late 2008, there was
no money available to float a struggling retailer.
No one was taking that risk. And so the final
blow comes in October. October 7, 2008. Bloomberg
News reports they've asked the bankruptcy court
for permission to auction off the remaining stores.
This is the moment they give up on reorganization.
This is the pivot to liquidation. And then just
a week later, on October 14th, the official sale
to asset recovery specialists. That's a nice
term for liquidators. The guys who come in and
sell everything off down to the shelves in the
cash registers. And on October 17, 2008, the
signs go up in the windows. Those big, ugly yellow
and red signs. Going out of business. Everything
must go. It's such a sad sight in any retail
landscape. It marked the definitive end of the
brick -and -mortar era for the company. The final
sales concluded on December 28, 2008. Right after
Christmas. So they got one last holiday season
of liquidation sales, and then the doors were
locked for good. Now, before we get to the really
strange zombie part of the story, the company's
afterlife, there is this really weird, almost
poetic cinematic interlude that I found in the
source material. Just too good not to mention.
I know exactly what you're talking about. It's
the Wes Anderson connection. Yes. Who would have
thought that a bankrupt Linens and Things would
become a footnote in the filmography of Wes Anderson?
It's a truly fascinating detail. So this is in
2011, a few years after all the stores have closed
and are sitting empty. There was a vacant Linens
and Things store in Middletown, Rhode Island.
Just a big, empty concrete box. You can just
picture it. Probably still has the faded outline
of the sign on the building. And Wes Anderson,
the director known for his incredibly stylized,
whimsical, handcrafted aesthetic, used that empty
store to construct and film a bunch of the interior
sets for his movie Moonrise Kingdom. That is
just wild to imagine. Inside this hollowed out
shell of corporate retail, of mass produced goods,
they are in there building these intricate, quirky,
beautiful little sets. It really is a poetic
image, isn't it? The ultimate symbol of mass
market consumerism emptied out and then temporarily
filled with this very artistic, very specific
world of a film. It's a strange and wonderful
little footnote in the company's history, like
a flower growing in a crack in the parking lot.
I love that. But OK, back to the business side
of things. The stores are closed. The movie sets
are packed up and gone. At this point, you would
think Linens and Things is dead and buried. But
in the digital age, brands rarely stay dead.
They just become, well, undead. And that brings
us to Section 7, the zombie brand. This phenomenon
is so interesting. The physical business failed.
The stores failed. The logistics failed. The
debt structure failed. But the brand name, the
two words linens and things, that still had value
in people's minds. People knew it. They trusted
it. Exactly. So even though the stores were gone,
the intellectual property was worth something
and someone was going to buy it. And it happened
practically immediately. In February 2009, while
the physical stores were still empty and dark,
the website LNT .com was relaunched. Right. A
new ownership group took over just the e -commerce
assets. They continue to focus on housewares.
The idea is simple. Capture all the residual
traffic of people who are still typing linens
and things into Google, looking for the store
they used to shop at. So if I went to that website
in 2009, I wasn't buying from the same company
that went bankrupt. Not at all. You were buying
from a completely different entity that had simply
purchased the intellectual property. They bought
the logo, the customer email list, and the domain
name. It's like they're wearing the old company's
skin. That is a gruesome but incredibly accurate
analogy. Skin suit? And then from there, the
brand just gets passed around like a hot potato.
It really does. It enters what the source calls
the ownership carousel. In December 2013, the
brand was sold by Gordon Brothers and Helco Global,
those are the original liquidation firms, to
another company called Galaxy Brand Holdings.
Galaxy Brand Holdings sounds very futuristic.
They're brand managers. They buy up names like
this and try to license them out or run a very
lean online operation. But the most interesting
chapter in this afterlife story starts in 2020,
July 2020. The Raviera. Ravy Retail E -Commerce
Ventures. This is a holding company founded by
Alex Mayer and Tai Lopez. Wait, the here in my
garage with my Lamborghini guy from all those
YouTube ads. The very same. He and his partner
built a business model almost entirely around
buying up these distressed brands. So their whole
business model is. What? Corporate necromancy.
Yeah. They go around buying the corpses of these
fallen retail giants. That's a great way to put
it. They buy brands that everyone over a certain
age knows, but that went bust in the physical
world. And they try to revive them purely as
e -commerce businesses. The source lists some
of the other brands they bought, and it's like
a graveyard of the 90s shopping mall. It really
is. Who else is in their collection? Let's see.
Dress Barn. Model Sporting Goods. The Franklin
Mint. Pier 1 Imports. Pier 1, that's another
one that hits that same nostalgic nerve. RadioShack.
They bought RadioShack. They bought RadioShack.
It's the same strategy. You buy the name for
a tiny fraction of what it was worth at its peak.
You don't have the overhead of 500 stores. You
don't have 7 ,000 employees. You just have the
URL and the logo. And you're banking on the fact
that when people need some obscure cable or battery,
they'll trust the name RadioShack more than a
random no -name seller on Amazon. But does it
actually work? Is Linens and Things now thriving
as an online zombie? Well, that is the big question.
Because the source gives us a pretty crucial
update from just last year, from 2023, that suggests
it might not be a foolproof plan. Right. So November
2020, REV relaunches the Linens and Things website
again. But then on March 2, 2023, the source
notes that REV, the parent company, the corporate
necromancer, announced it was considering its
own bankruptcy filing. Wait, hold on. So the
company that built its business on buying bankrupt
companies is now on the verge of going bankrupt
itself. The irony is just off the charts. It
highlights just how volatile and difficult the
retail sector is. Even when you strip away all
the costs of brick and mortar stores, even just
running it as a lean website, it is incredibly
hard to make money. It turns out that simply
owning a nostalgic name isn't enough. You still
have to run a good business. You still have to
compete with Amazon and Wayfair and everyone
else. So the zombie might die again? Or it might
get sold out of RV's potential bankruptcy to
another holding company who will try to revive
it all over again. The cycle could just continue
forever. The name might outlive all of us. That's
a mind -boggling thought. It is. So let's just
trace that arc one more time. We've gone from
a leased linen department in a discount store
in 1958, to a multi -billion dollar 571 store
empire, to a debt burdened casualty of the 2008
crash, to a movie set for Wes Anderson, to a
digital ghost passed between online investors.
It is a wild ride, an absolute textbook example
of the modern retail life cycle. So let's wrap
this up. What is the big takeaway here when we
look at this entire what? 60 -plus year arc?
For me, I think the biggest lesson is about fragility.
We tend to look at these big category killers,
these massive chains with huge concrete and steel
buildings, and we think they are invincible,
permanent fixtures of the landscape. Right. But
this story shows that when you load them up with
too much debt, make a few strategic missteps,
and then hit a rough economic patch, they can
crumble incredibly shockingly fast. And for me,
the takeaway is about the nature of a brand versus
a business. I can still go to LNT .com today.
Yeah. But am I really buying from linens and
things? Not really. I'm buying from a company
that just owns the logo. The actual experience
walking into that store, smelling the potpourri,
touching the towels, that has gone forever. That's
a great point. It completely separates the brand
from the business. The business died in 2008.
The brand is just a ghost that's left haunting
the Internet. Which brings us to our final provocative
thought for you, the listener. We live in a world
that is now full of these zombie brands. We do,
more and more every year. So the next time you
are shopping online and you see a familiar, nostalgic
name from your childhood, whether it's Linens
and Things or Radio Shack or Pier One or any
of the others, ask yourself this. Are you buying
into the quality and the trust that built that
name 50 years ago? Or are you just buying the
nostalgia of the logo? That is the multi -billion
dollar question. buyer beware. Thanks for diving
deep with us today. We'll see you on the next
one. Goodbye.