Is private equity tearing the soul out of Morrisons supermarket?

theguardian.com:

‘We all say he would be turning in his grave. It is not what it was,” says one former member of staff outside the Girlington branch of Morrisons in Bradford.

On the streets of the West Yorkshire city that Sir Ken Morrison helped put on the map, the mood surrounding Britain’s fifth-biggest supermarket chain is decidedly glum.

The former employee is far from alone in shuddering at the thought of what Morrison, who created a national chain from his dad’s grocery shop, would make of its current state.

Sixteen months on from a feverish bidding battle that ended with the giant US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) taking it over for £7bn, the 124-year-old chain has fallen into a hole that just keeps getting deeper.

While shoppers grumble about gaps on shelves, prices that keep rising, a less-rewarding loyalty scheme, fewer staff, increasingly tatty stores and more of the dreaded self-checkouts, the financial players that supported the top-of-the-market takeover are also getting cold feet. Spooked by the chain’s haemorrhaging of market share and rising interest rates, the banks that supported the deal to buy Morrisons have just offloaded €500m of debt at a steep discount, making a loss on their investment.

What happens next to Morrisons matters hugely for its 110,000 staff, its army of suppliers and the communities that rely on it across the UK. Rising interest rates and departing customers heighten the risk that its private equity owners – which piled it high with debt via the takeover – will resort to tried-and-tested tactics of asset-stripping and cost-cutting to scrape together the overly optimistic returns they promised their backers 16 months ago. Troubling signs of that are already starting to emerge.

Rumour