I thought the same thing, these businesses clearly are out of cash and credit and need to break leases to save SOME stores compared to losing all. The idea of

I thought the same thing, these businesses clearly are out of cash and credit and need to break leases to save SOME stores compared to losing all. The idea of harsh leases in large retail stores kinda always made me laugh: For a JCP or the like, the setup costs, warehousing, and hiring work is so great that the only case where they would close a store is to stop cash from hemorrhaging beyond control. On a large scale this forces the only move for survival to be bankruptcy after falling way too far. If you're PREIT or such one can't help but realize that the overall outcome is that you'll push a tenant of a vast majority of your stores into really bad financial states that then leads to a much harder bankruptcy and possibly dissolving of the company, ripping stores out of ALL of your malls instead of 30%. And thats why PREIT has so many malls with empty giant rooms and defaulted loans.