Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.
Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.
The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.
Is this why the one in my area has been closed, but hasn’t been turned into something else? It even still has the signage.
No, that’s because no one has turned it to anything else. So the owners collect a tax write off until they can sell it or lease it. The ones in my area have been long since torn down or remodeled into something else. It took 20 years for all the Kmarts around me to disappear. Large assets like these take time to move and are expensive to acquire. Very few companies are going to jump on them, especially since more often then not, a new building is cheaper then a remodel on a 30 year old one.