Although it’s been almost 15 years, I can still vividly remember that March afternoon. My wife, Connie, came home from substitute teaching, walked in the door, and saw me sitting in the living room. With a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What are you doing here?”
It was the middle of the day. She had reason to ask this question. For the previous 30 or so years I had gotten up Monday through Friday and went to my job in the IT department at Shopko here in Green Bay. Needless to say, she wasn’t used to seeing me at home at this time of day.
“I lost my job,” I said.
Connie just looked at me, stunned, and asked, “What are we going to do?”
Little did I know that over the next several years I would get a crash course on private equity and what is referred to as “vulture capitalism.” I would also have a front row seat as corporate greed cost my Green Bay friends and neighbors their benefits, jobs and livelihoods.
Most people from this part of Wisconsin are familiar with the Shopko story — founded in the early 1960s in Green Bay, where they opened their first store, and grew to 15,000 employees and over 350 retails stores nationwide. Shopko was not just a source of employment for us in Green Bay, it was also a sense of Wisconsin pride.
Like many other struggling retail companies at the time, Shopko was taken over by a Wall Street private equity firm: Sun Capital Partners. Instead of keeping the company afloat, Sun Capital ultimately led Shopko to declare bankruptcy in January 2019. And just a few months later, on March 18 — one year ago today — Shopko announced the closure of all remaining stores.
All of Shopko’s stores are now closed, resulting in almost 2,500 jobs lost for Wisconsinites. Ultimately, 52 stores and a support center closed in Wisconsin. What’s more, it’s estimated that the private equity takeover of Shopko resulted in 22,800 jobs lost nationwide.
This didn’t just happen on its own. President Trump’s 2017 tax law increased the value of these vulture capitalist firms by between 3-17%, on average, his 2018 Bank Lobbyist Act rolled back consumer protections that were established in the Dodd-Frank Act while allowing banks to engage in the kind of risky behavior that caused the 2008 financial crash.
While Wisconsinites and people nationwide were fighting to make ends meet in the face of losing their jobs, Sun Capital and the other investors made $170 million in the form of dividend payments from Shopko by the time it declared bankruptcy, in addition to allegedly avoiding $8 million in sales tax owed to Wisconsin between 2013 and 2016.
When Connie asked me, “What are we going to do?” I really did not know what to say. She was a stay-at-home mom and we still had two kids at home. Everyone in our family relied on me for my income and my insurance benefits. It was hard not to feel like I had lost my self-worth. Thankfully, Connie and I had made a concerted effort over the years to build a nest egg, so we had something to fall back on. However, I knew that we were the exception, rather than the rule.
So many of my former Shopko coworkers, many of whom had given 25, 30, 35 years to the company were in dire straits. And to make matters worse, a once-promised severance package never came to fruition — leaving countless out in the cold and forcing many to make decisions that were often of life or death.
Corporations looking out for their bottom line is nothing new and it’s not something that really bothers me. Some would even say it’s a hallmark of capitalism. However, when the rules are intentionally rigged to make it easier for Wall Street to loot Main Street — that’s what really gets me mad.
I’ve lived in Wisconsin my entire life and have called Green Bay home over the last 40 years. Like so many others at Shopko, all I wanted was to be able to work hard, support my family and retire with dignity. Instead, our future fell victim to vulture capitalists who cared more about buying up companies and running them into the ground — rewarding wealth, instead of hard work.
Jim Jordan, of Howard, is a former Shopko employee of over 30 years. He is a steering committee member of Opportunity Wisconsin, a coalition of Wisconsin residents fighting for an economy that works for working people. Tonight, Opportunity Wisconsin will be hosting a virtual town hall to mark the one-year anniversary of Shopko announcing the closure of all remaining stores. Learn more and RSVP: OpportunityWisconsin.org/events.
Story originally published by The Cap Times.
