How a retail giant drifts from market leader to liquidation

Retail chains almost never die from a single blow. They die from a long sequence of small decisions, each defensible at the time, that compound into a balance sheet no turnaround can fix. The pattern is so consistent across retail economics that you can describe the stages of a collapse without naming a single company, and that is the point of this piece: once you know the sequence, you can watch it happen in real time. The most important qualification is this: collapse is usually a financing story before it is a shopping story. Shoppers notice empty shelves and shorter hours late in the process. The decisive moves, leveraged buyouts, sale-leaseback deals, dividend recapitalizations, happen years earlier, in rooms no customer ever enters. Coverage that begins when the liquidation notice is posted misses most of the anatomy. This article walks through that anatomy stage by stage.

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