More specifics needed on Romney’s time with Bain Capital

Romney has been running as much on his experience as a venture capitalist as he has on his experience as a governor.

That makes his actions at Bains fair game.

The problem with the game that we are seeing though is there is no scoreboard, no endzone, not anything that could let us analyze his activities in any disciplined way.

Romney says that he saved lots of jobs.  That is possible.  Here is the case for the Bain Capital approach.

Sears/Kmart has needed to be taken over and house cleaned for at least 20 years and the failure of anybody to do that may result in a formerly iconic brand collapsing within the next 2-3 years.

Walk into a Walmart, Target, Staples or similar store and you will be struck by the level of focus.  Every available space is taken up by something that somebody wants or needs to buy, usually at a realistic price.

Walk into a Sears store, or some of the other old dinosaur stores, and you see vast empty spaces sparsely filled with mostly garbage.  Within 30 seconds of walking in to a Sears store, you should be able to determine that no thought has gone into it as a business at all.

A couple of years back I was given a $250 Sears gift card.  I walked through the local store, top to bottom, and wound up settling for some socks and underwear and used the rest to buy a $200 prepaid visa card.

The few things in the store that I had any interest in were absurdly overpriced.  I couldn’t find anything to spend $200 on in the entire 2 level store.

Maybe 5 years ago I was in a Sears store for some electronic thing, I can’t remember exactly what it was, and I found it at a reasonable discount, so I took it to a till.

The person at the till was distracted for about 10 minutes by some caller on the phone who had some vague enquiry about some minor type of product.  The result of that conversation was predictably inconclusive, after which the cashier put in my purchase.  The price that came up was more than $100 over the posted discount price, presumably the undiscounted price. 

So I tell the cashier this.  About then somebody else comes up to the counter, he says he’ll look into it after he rings their purchases through.  Then we go to where the price is posted and he sees it.  I can’t remember exactly why he didn’t ring it in then and there as it was some time ago, whether he needed to call somebody for an override which may have been why he couldn’t just put in the posted price, and then he gets caught up with other people coming to the till with minor items (mine was I recall in the $200 range).

Eventually I just put it down and left in disgust.

If there is a number 1 egregious sin of sales, it is inability to close a made sale, a problem that some internet retailers used to have.  How do you lose a sale when the customer has decided to buy the item for the posted price and brought it to the cashier to pay for it? 

If you look at the majority of Sears clothing, the impression you will have is that somebody somewhere wants to ensure that their retarded nephew has gainful employment and has secured the retard a position designing clothing to be sold at Sears.

You will find much higher quality at Value Village.

Sears employs 300,000 people.  If somebody like Bains Capital doesn’t come along and clean house, all of them will lose their jobs.   If the right people come along, Sears might employ 200,000 people 3 years from now.  It might go from there to employing 5 million people 20 years from now, with multiple branches in Berlin and Moscow and Beijing and Tokyo.

I take it that Sears has survived for so long on brand loyalty.  Nobody hates Sears.  There is something all-American about it, down to the blissful incompetence of a monolithic company and intransigence in the face of looming disaster. 

Surviving on brand loyalty and nothing else is like surviving in an ICU on a ventilator.  Brand loyalty is the ventilator, making the patient’s chest go up and down.  You need more than that to have a future.

The collapse of a monolithic company makes waves.  Marquee companies like Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers etc. seem to have a stronger negative effect on the markets, and possibly the economy, than hard data.  It is better if a way can be found for them to be saved, if it is viable.

Here is the negative side of the “Vulture Capitalists”.  Some groups of investors have historically done the opposite of the above, performed essentially hostile takeovers of undervalued, viable companies and looted them, turning them into unviable disasters.

Romney has been accused of being a party to some of these raids, although there is a lack of readily available published specifics.

If Romney did take a company over and destroy the lives of everybody involved so he and a group of corporate predators could get rich, I would see that as extremely relevant as to whether he could be trusted to be president. 

I would, however, need to have more specifics. 

I would be particularly interested in facts such as the financial situation of a company and the wage profiles of the employees before the takeover and at various stages after the takeover. 

If there is a company taken over by Romney that had a profit in its’ last quarter before takeover, and which was in good shape, but which closed within a couple of years after takeover, which sending out massive amounts of cash to Romney and his investors, that would be a major black mark on Romney’s record.

The assessment has to be done for each company that his group took over.

The only specific company that Romney’s group took over that I know anything about [that I am aware of] is Staples, which he organized a takeover of.  Staples is one of the more useful companies out there, and branches keep sprouting up everywhere, so it is more than viable.  On the other hand the staff are a little dim so I suspect that they aren’t paid much.

One possibility is that the results are a mixed bag and that it is possible to financially save a company but kill it’s soul.   Romney has been made out to either be a corporate saviour or a corporate antichrist and it is more likely that there have been some good and some bad results, sometimes mixed together. 

If Romney is the only candidate to save or create more minimum wage jobs than Rick Perry, that would not make him particularly heroic.

There is insufficient information published in any readily available media links to assess Romney’s business record in any disciplined way.

I take it that the failure of any campaign, including Romney’s, to publish such information and make it readily available is because the information if published will muddy the issue and detract from the simplistic, improbable clarity of the messages of the individual campaigns.  That said, I would really like to see the information myself and make my own assessment.