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I'm not sure if I believe that story, though. Look at Sears, for example. Yes, they mostly missed the wave on e-commerce, and were on a decline ever since then.

• toast0 1y ago
  My claim is not that the trajectory didn't change, but that the destination didn't change. Sears was clearly failing. Asset stripping turned a slowly failing company into a company operating normally for a period of time until it became a failed company all at once. The alternative to asset stripping would be Sears either selling off stores in chunks until it figured out how to operate profitably or became small enough to acquire; or Sears closing stores and renting them to others. Both of those strategies are hard to execute on, especially with Sears shaped stores, nobody is looking to expand into that at the scale that Sears needed to shrink. But, for a single location hospital, you can't continue operation and let someone else use the building. If someone wants to take over operating as a hospital, that's fine... but if the hospital is consistently losing money, who wants to take over operating it? So, sell and lease back lets you keep running for a while longer.