Desastre de US$ 2,2 bilhões: como Richard Baker matou a Saks Fifth Avenue

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475 milhões de dólares. Perdido. Em 13 meses. Foi isso que a Amazon perdeu quando apoiou um plano para fundir a Saks Fifth Avenue, a Neiman Marcus e a Bergdorf Goodman num único império de luxo. O negócio foi fechado em dezembro de 2024. Em janeiro de 2026, a coisa toda estava no tribunal de falências.

Esta noite, como um promotor imobiliário sobrecarregou um dos últimos grandes retalhistas de luxo da América com 2,2 mil milhões de dólares em dívidas que nunca poderia pagar. E quem foi pago, enquanto dez mil vendedores esperavam por cheques que nunca chegaram.

Saks owed Chanel a hundred and thirty-six million dollars. It owed Kering, the company behind Gucci, sixty million. It owed Louis Vuitton's parent, LVMH, twenty-six million. So the brands did the one thing a luxury store cannot survive. They stopped shipping. The shelves went bare. Revenue crashed thirteen percent in a single quarter. And the whole time, the chief executive was collecting retention bonuses worth millions. When a hundred-million-dollar interest payment came due on December thirtieth, 2025, Saks didn't pay it. It couldn't. This is the story of who lit the match.

To understand how it died, you have to understand the man who built it, and what he was really collecting. His name is Richard Baker, and Richard Baker is not a retailer. His family built shopping malls. He is a real-estate man. And to a real-estate man, a department store is not a business that sells handbags. It is a building, in an expensive location, with a struggling tenant attached.

In 2013, Baker's company, Hudson's Bay, bought Saks for two-point-nine billion dollars. And then he did something that tells you everything about the next decade. The very next year, in 2014, he took out a mortgage on a single building, the Saks flagship at 611 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The mortgage was for one-point-two-five billion dollars. And an independent appraiser valued that one building at three-point-seven billion dollars. Read that again. The flagship store was worth more than Baker had paid for the entire company. The real estate was the prize. The retail business was just the thing standing on top of it.

That became the playbook. Buy a famous old retailer. Pull the value out of its real estate. Let the store itself slowly drift. Baker did it to Lord and Taylor, which sold its flagship and then went bankrupt in 2020. He did it to Hudson's Bay's own Canadian stores, which liquidated in 2025. He did it to the German chain Galeria Kaufhof, which fell into insolvency. The buildings got monetized. The retailers got hollowed out. Saks Global was simply the next act in a play we had already watched several times.

Which brings us to the deal that loaded the gun.

In July 2024, Hudson's Bay announced it would buy Neiman Marcus for two-point-six-five billion dollars, and fold it together with Saks into a new company called Saks Global. On paper, it sounded visionary. Combine the three biggest names in American luxury. Cut six hundred million in costs. Bring in Amazon, which invested four hundred and seventy-five million dollars, and Salesforce, to make it a, quote, technology-powered luxury platform. The press releases gleamed.

There was one warning sign that almost nobody talked about. Neiman Marcus had already been through bankruptcy once, just four years earlier. It filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020, crushed under five billion dollars in debt left over from its own leveraged buyouts. A group of hedge funds, including PIMCO, Davidson Kempner, and Sixth Street, took it over and wiped out four billion dollars of that debt. And when Saks came knocking in 2024, those same hedge funds didn't just sell. They received a two-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar seller's note as part of the deal. In other words, the investors who had rescued Neiman Marcus from one bankruptcy got paid to hand it straight into the path of another one. The pattern was already visible, if anyone cared to look. Nobody wanted to look. The story was too good.

But look at how it was financed, because that is where the body is buried. To pay for Neiman Marcus, Saks Global issued two-point-two billion dollars in bonds. Not ordinary bonds. Junk-rated bonds, paying eleven percent interest. Eleven percent. On two-point-two billion dollars. That is roughly two hundred and forty million dollars a year, in interest alone, that the company had to pay before it bought a single dress, hired a single sales associate, or paid a single vendor.

Let me explain what that actually does to a business, in plain terms. When you load a company with this much high-interest debt to buy it, the debt does not sit with the buyers. It sits on the company you just bought. The new owners' job is essentially done at closing. They've made their fees, locked in their position. But the store now wakes up every single day owing enormous sums, and every dollar that comes through the register has to first go toward feeding that debt. There is very little left for the actual business of selling luxury goods. Add in the other loans, the asset-based facility, the term loan from Apollo Global, and Saks Global's total annual debt service climbed well over four hundred million dollars a year, against a business that was already losing money. The math never worked. It was never going to work. It was built not to work.

And the people who felt it first were the vendors.

In February 2025, just two months after the merger closed, the chief executive, Marc Metrick, sent a memo to the brands that supplied Saks. In it, he admitted the company was sitting on an eighteen-month backlog of unpaid bills. Eighteen months. And his proposed solution was breathtaking. He asked the vendors to wait another ninety days, and then accept repayment spread out over twelve monthly installments. In other words: we owe you for goods you shipped a year and a half ago, and we'd like another fifteen months to pay you.

Now, if you are Chanel, or Gucci, or Louis Vuitton, you do not need Saks. You have your own boutiques, your own websites, your own waiting lists. So the brands made a rational decision. They stopped shipping. And a luxury department store with empty shelves is not a luxury department store. It's an expensive, beautiful, half-empty building.

By the summer of 2025, the debt itself began to crack. Saks went to its bondholders and asked them to swap their notes for new ones, a maneuver Standard and Poor's described as tantamount to a default, because the lenders effectively took a loss of more than a hundred million dollars to keep the company breathing. Saks scrambled together a six-hundred-million-dollar emergency financing package just to make it through the year. None of it fixed the core problem. You cannot refinance your way out of a structure that loses money on every turn of the calendar. You can only delay the moment someone has to admit it.

The numbers tell the story of the spiral. In the second quarter of 2025, revenue fell more than thirteen percent in a single quarter. The company posted a net loss of two hundred and eighty-eight million dollars. By mid-year, it had burned through four hundred and ten million dollars in cash. The vendors who were owed the most, Chanel at a hundred and thirty-six million, Kering at sixty, were now standing in a line that was getting longer by the week. And the holiday season, the one quarter a luxury retailer absolutely cannot afford to fumble, arrived with the shelves looking thin.

So while all of this was happening, where was the money going?

This is the part that should make you angry. According to filings later made in bankruptcy court, the executives running this collapse were paid extraordinarily well on the way down. Marc Metrick, the chief executive, received around eight million dollars, including retention bonuses paid in the middle of the crisis and a two-and-a-half-million-dollar severance. When a new chief executive was brought in, he received an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar signing bonus, paid in the middle of a bankruptcy. The chief financial officer got a three-million-dollar retention bonus. And Richard Baker, the man whose playbook this was, collected over two million dollars in payments, plus the forgiveness of nearly half a million dollars in personal loans.

Retention bonuses are not illegal. Companies argue they're needed to keep key people from fleeing a sinking ship. But step back and look at the picture. The vendors who actually made the products were told to wait eighteen months, then thirty months, for money they were owed. The executives who steered the ship into the rocks were paid millions to stay on board. That is not a glitch in the system. That is the system, working exactly as designed.

In the final weeks, Saks scrambled. It sold the Neiman Marcus flagship building in Beverly Hills in a sale-leaseback deal, raising cash by selling the real estate and then renting it back. The real estate, once again, was the asset. But it wasn't enough. On December thirtieth, 2025, the company missed a roughly hundred-million-dollar interest payment on its bonds. On January second, Marc Metrick resigned. On January eighth, the ratings agency Standard and Poor's downgraded Saks Global to, in their words, selective default, with a verdict that the capital structure was, quote, unsustainable.

And then, on January thirteenth and fourteenth, 2026, Saks Global and a hundred and twelve related entities filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas, carrying roughly three-point-four billion dollars in debt.

The reckoning came fast. On January fifteenth, Amazon walked into the bankruptcy court and told the judge that its four-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar investment was now, quote, worthless. Amazon accused Saks of, quote, burning through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year. One of the most sophisticated investors on the planet had watched nearly half a billion dollars evaporate in thirteen months.

And below the billionaires and the brand names, there were the people who actually moved the boxes. In two Pennsylvania towns, Wilkes-Barre and Pottsville, Saks filed legal notices warning that nearly six hundred distribution-center workers would lose their jobs. These were not executives with retention bonuses or hedge funds with seller's notes. They were warehouse workers, non-union, with no severance protections, packing the handbags and the perfume that the brands had stopped sending. Across all the rounds of layoffs, more than twenty-eight hundred people lost their jobs or faced losing them. Hundreds of vendors took their place in the creditors' queue, hoping to recover cents on the dollar. Some suppliers, more than six hundred of them, only resumed shipping after the bankruptcy court released emergency funds to start paying down what they were owed.

So who actually killed Saks Fifth Avenue?

It is tempting to blame the vendors who stopped shipping, or the executives who took the bonuses, or even Amazon for backing the deal. But the truth is simpler, and colder. Saks Global was not a retailer that got into trouble. It was a financial structure, designed to extract value at the moment of closing, that happened to have stores attached. The real estate had already been mortgaged. The debt was loaded on at eleven percent. The fees were collected. The bonuses were paid. Everyone who designed the structure got their money out before the building ever caught fire.

What was left behind was the part that was always going to lose. The vendors. The sales associates. The eighty-five-year-old name on the Fifth Avenue marquee. Saks Fifth Avenue will probably survive, in some smaller, leaner form, with fewer stores and a billion dollars in remaining debt. But the lesson of its collapse is the lesson of this entire era of finance. You can take a healthy, storied, profitable American institution, load it with debt, strip out its real assets, pay yourself handsomely, and walk away rich, long before the thing actually dies. The structure was never built to last. It was built to be extracted from. And when it finally went bare, on the shelves of the most famous luxury store in America, the people who built it that way were already gone, counting their money somewhere else.