Collateral Damage
JoAnn Fabrics and the Death of Main Street
It didn’t happen all at once.
There was no sudden bankruptcy.
No headlines screaming the company was dead.
Instead, JoAnn Fabrics — a beloved American retailer, a gathering place for crafters, quilters, teachers, and entrepreneurs — has been slowly hollowed out, store by store, job by job, community by community.
Not by Amazon.
Not by changing tastes.
But by the same quiet financial looters who killed Toys R Us.
The Buyout
In 2011, JoAnn Fabrics was acquired by a private equity firm called Leonard Green & Partners for about $1.6 billion.
The story was familiar:
JoAnn was profitable.
JoAnn had strong community ties.
JoAnn had survived economic downturns, competition, and change.
But after the buyout, everything changed.
Leonard Green loaded JoAnn with debt — hundreds of millions of dollars — and began siphoning off cash through management fees and special dividends.
Rather than investing in modernization, technology, or expanding into new markets, the focus was on extraction.
Stores started to feel neglected.
Staff levels dropped.
Inventory quality declined.
And loyal customers noticed.
The Slow Decline
JoAnn Fabrics didn’t crash overnight like Toys R Us.
Instead, it began to rot from within:
Store locations became threadbare and poorly maintained.
Supply chains weakened, leading to frequent stockouts.
Skilled, full-time employees were replaced by underpaid part-timers.
Customer service, once a hallmark of the brand, deteriorated.
Even as the company stumbled, private equity owners paid themselves well.
Leonard Green collected fees year after year — no matter how badly the business performed.
Meanwhile, JoAnn’s leadership leaned into gimmicks:
Cheap loyalty programs.
Low-wage hiring pushes.
Desperate promotions to drive foot traffic.
None of it addressed the real disease: a company crushed by debt, bled by fees, and left too weak to adapt.
In 2021, JoAnn was pushed into going public again — not because it was ready, but because Leonard Green wanted an exit.
The burden of debt and decay was dumped back onto public shareholders.
The private equity firm cashed out.
The Impact on Communities
JoAnn Fabrics wasn’t just a retailer.
It was a piece of Main Street life — a place where kids picked up their first school project supplies, where small business owners sourced materials, where elderly hobbyists kept lifelong skills alive.
Its slow collapse mirrors the quiet devastation happening in countless towns across America:
Empty strip malls.
Fewer good part-time jobs.
Communities losing another small anchor that made local life vibrant.
It’s not just about profits.
It’s about belonging.
And when Main Street dies, something inside the town dies with it.
Today, in False Promises, we explored The Authoritarian Playbook — how broken economies create broken societies, where fear, anger, and hopelessness can be weaponized.
The slow, quiet collapse of places like JoAnn Fabrics is part of that story.
When jobs dry up, when businesses fail, when trust in local institutions withers — people look for someone to blame.
And authoritarians are always ready with an answer:
Blame the immigrants.
Blame the unions.
Blame the poor.
Never blame the billionaires who gutted your town and got rich doing it.
Coming up tomorrow:
The Silent Kill: How Wall Street Gutted American Healthcare.
(Because the heist didn’t stop with toy stores and craft shops — it moved into hospitals, where the cost of looting is measured in lives.)