Privately, I say it’s a bad idea

SOthe decendants of John W. Nordstrom say they want to take the retailer private. In this nosediving retail environment, if that’s not a crime, then it is just plain stupid.

While the company’s shareholders liked the idea of a bailout — sending shares up 10 percent, to $44.63, on the news Thursday — the stock remains down from more than $80 per share in 2015.

The company’s market cap has shrunk to a mere $6.7 billion on sales of $14.4 billion and net income of only $354 million in 2016 — its fourth year in a row of declining profits. And Nordstrom already has $2.7 billion of debt.

So leveraging up the balance sheet with debt when the sky is falling in the retail sector is borderline financial insanity.

However, as the retail world has begun to fall apart and department stores shutter left and right due to permanent, fundamental alterations to the retail landscape, it makes me wonder if there are any sane individuals running things in the sector.

To date, no company except Jet.com has figured out how to successfully compete with Nordstrom’s crosstown rival Amazon, albeit on a smaller scale.

However, Jet.com did it well enough that Walmart paid $3.3 billion for the Hoboken, NJ-based startup last August. And Jet.com was only founded in April 2014.

The entire retail landscape is shifting to online retailing. Wouldn’t it be smarter for Nordstrom to embrace the modern world and maybe acquire some smart online platform?

The Nordstrom “kids” already made a very serious mistake by choosing to wade into politics and announce to the world they would discontinue carrying Ivanka Trump’s fashion line. That’s just bad business. Why tick off half the country’s customer base?

The point here is to never give a perfectly content customer a reason not to shop at your store.

And leveraging up an already debt-loaded balance sheet in this retail environment has to be bad business, too.