House of pain
Strip-mall pill mill goes bust
Good morning, pill poppers. This is your Stock Market Rundown for August 29th, 2023. Thanks for joining me. Let’s get into it:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: RITE AID’S WRONG TURN 💊
Usually, Rite Aid is where you might pick up Tylenol or Advil, but recently the company’s over-leveraged balance sheet is giving shareholders a migraine headache.
Rite Aid riding the struggle bus is not news. The previous CEO left abruptly last January, after the stock sagged during her tenure. COVID-19 was a boon for drugstores, but waning demand for vaccines and testing has dented Rite-Aid’s revenue since the panny ended.
Management has attempted to merge with various competitors to shore up its capital position, and almost made it to the altar with Walgreens in 2017, but ended up getting jilted every time.
Now, Rite Aid is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to being slammed with more than a thousand federal and state opioid lawsuits Apparently, your friendly neighborhood pharmacist was actually a drug kingpin.
The feds claim Rite Aid “knowingly filed unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances'', merrily doling out pain pills despite “obvious red flags”. Settlements could run in the billions.
Thing is, now that Rite Aid has filed for bankruptcy, any liabilities related to the opioid lawsuits will be treated as unsecured claims. That means they’ll only get any money left over after other lenders are paid in full.
And given Rite Aid has over $3 billion in debt, that probably means the government can’t expect more than a handful of spare change and some pocket lint.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Is this why the SharkNinja blender I ordered off Amazon hasn’t been delivered yet? The Panama Canal is in an epic traffic jam due to low rainfall levels, with hundreds of boats stuck on either side.
Get ready to put on your footie pajamas and curl up with a Pumpkin Spice Latte: to draw store traffic from cult fans, Starbucks relaunches the cinnamon-scented calorie bomb earlier and earlier every year. (And yes, it does contain actual pumpkin.)
The founder of 5-Hour Energy Drink is buying the company that owns Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal. Wild: this guy got so rich selling a weird supplement to sleepy truckers at gas stations, that he can afford to acquire some of the most iconic brands in media.
With streaming taking over, broadcast TV has just slipped below 50% of US viewing time. Yes, there are still millions of people who flip on the TV to see “what’s on the idiot box”... they’re called senior citizens.
That’s all I’ve got for you for today, friends; catch you on the flip side. Yours in capitalism, The Axe