Hertz Seeking to Avoid Bankruptcy After Missing Lease Payment, Report Says:
Quarantines and other recent coronavirus measures have decimated travel, both globally and domestically. Of course, this has a ripple effect on tangential industries, as well, like car rentals. As developments continue, one report claims that a car-rental giant might be facing some big financial issues.
Hertz has failed to make a lease payment and is exploring a possible bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reports [$], citing sources familiar with the matter. In a statement to Roadshow, Hertz confirmed its financial situation: "We are reducing expenses, deferring capital expenditures, and adjusting fleet levels and staffing based on the significant decline in travel demand," said a Hertz spokesperson via email. "Importantly, conversations with our lenders are ongoing and we remain in discussions with the US Treasury for support."
[...] According to the WSJ report, Hertz is currently holding $17 billion in debt, an overwhelming majority of which is attributed to car notes on its rental fleet. Hertz, like competitors such as Enterprise, have laid off staff and tried to get the money together to continue operating during these lean times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2020, @04:40PM (3 children)
When you file for bankrupty, don't forget to trigger the $14.95/day charge for toll road transponder immediately by surrounding the office with toll roads. 100 booths but none that take cash or credit. Bye!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 06 2020, @01:50AM (2 children)
Lot of things get exposed during a crisis. I sure wasn't guessing that the way our economy and society works would be questioned so quickly and fundamentally. A lot of questions that needed asking are finally getting serious consideration.
Do we drive around way too much? Too much in love with owning our own cars, and using them? What is a business trip for, really? You fly in, rent a car, drive to the site, and fix whatever the problem is. You are basically a smokejumper. And commuting to work, if it's a desk job, why is that necessary to do every single working day?
Then there's the spontaneous shopaholic who darts out to the store for every little thing, making not just one trip a day, but 3 or 4. Back in the day, you planned shopping trips a bit more carefully, so that you need only go once or twice a week. Basically revolved around the luxury of keeping fresh, perishable food items on hand.
When the pandemic is over, things won't go back to the old normal. Whether we need as large a car rental market as existed before, I have doubts. But in case we do, we absolutely should save Hertz, just like we saved GM back in 2008. This is not their fault.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 06 2020, @04:32AM (1 child)
So what if it's "questioned"? Is anything really broken?
Were any of those questions worth asking? Sounds like a big "no" to me.
So what? Nobody is perfectly rational and this just isn't a significant consumption of resources. When this is over, maybe they'll plan better in the future, or maybe they'll revert to old behavior (which I think will be what most people do).
Nonsense, things weren't that way in the old normal because covid world was better. I think most activities will revert, because that's what's wanted and likely worked better for the person/people undertaking those activities.
Unless, of course, they failed for other reasons. As I noted a while ago, this is a golden opportunity to dump the last few years of failure all at once and blame it on covid. I definitely am not interested in saving the first few companies to go belly up. Those probably would have died anyway.
In summary, I don't see covid as a transformative except perhaps for future handling of epidemics and bioweapons. My view is that most will go back to what they did before.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 06 2020, @06:29PM
Absolutely worth asking questions about our lifestyle! Not pushing back, not even asking, is why we have the evils we call suburban sprawl, and many others.
The changes I've seen just in my lifetime are astounding both in quantity and scope. Go back to 1900 or a bit more, perhaps the start of the Industrial Revolution circa 1830, and it's just incredible. People who pine for the Good Old Days, and mean the 1950s, have no appreciation for how radically different life had become by then. In 1900, much travel was by horse, with the railroad and ship for long distances over land and water respectively. TV and radio didn't exist in 1900, and the telephone was still real new. Same for refrigerators, A/C, incandescent lights, and even electricity in the home. And plastics, nylon, zippers, many vaccines and other medical things, radar, man-made satellites, nuclear power (and weapons), and lots more.
More difficult to appreciate are the softer sorts of revolutions in thinking. The Church's persecution of Galileo, the infamous Salem Witch Trials, and later the Scopes Monkey Trial, and McCarthyism, ended up exposing dogmatic and irrational thinking and fearmongering as careless of costs and lacking basic human decency, fairness, and kindness, apart from their plain wrongness on the purely technical level. It is as was said to McCarthy: "at long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Many other events and movements, such as WWII, have confirmed and emphasized this.
I am definitely not in favor of saving Hertz from progress. Maybe their business was dying anyway, and this pandemic is a better time than most to end it. But I don't feel at all sure of that. And so, for the sake of Hertz's employees, and travelers and others who need and depend upon this form of transportation, I say that Hertz should be helped. What have we to replace Hertz? Avis? Is Avis any healthier, financially? I doubt it. Uber and Lyft? Certainly not public transportation! Obviously not horses either. Nor is bicycling or walking practical, not the way our suburbs are designed.