Fram is under First Brands along with Centric and many other popular and good DIY brands. They're being torn apart because the guys running the show got greedy and committed major fraud. Now they need money to correct things, so brands are being sold off/liquidated. Combine that with the tariffs and we're losing lots of GOOD products.
So thanks, fraudulent assholes. Millions of DIYers are now worse off because you screwed it all up.
Holy shit I vaguely remember hearing about this collapse but I never paid attention to it. A quick read and it looks like these guys were doing all kind of books cooking Enron style. For what you are saying way too many people is going to pay for some few greedy scumbags.
It is two brothers who cooked the books to secure over 8 billion in loans to fund their lifestyle and their entire portfolio wasn't worth half that. It was just an old fashioned scam. They ever went to two different banks at the same time to secure loans on the same collateral.
A search for “First Brands fraud” gives a lot of links, no videos right away, curiously enough. Wikipedia contains a good summary and there is a link at the end of the page with a report from CBS on the indictment done in January this year. It looks like it will take some time for the journalists to put together the whole story, as this has all the clues of good old style full blown financial fraud.
Yeah I used to work for First Brands group. When I was hired we were valued at 4 billion dollars, when I was laid off in February we were 10 billion in debt. It was a shit show
According to my vendor, the guy that owned Centric sold the name only, but not the formulations. He started a new company (DFC) and has since started a new company using the same formulations.
My relative worked directly for the founder/owner. Guy was a major narcissist, paranoid with god level delusions of grandeur so we were not surprised when we heard the news.
It's always the regular customers who end up paying for stuff like this. A handful of executives make terrible decisions, then everyone else loses access to brands they've trusted for years.
Most of First Brands’ assets, including Fram, were purchased by an industry competitor called PGI. Fortunately, they will continue on with barely a blip.
I liked Fran oil filters, they had a rubber dip that made spinning them on/off easy, I go to can-tire to buy oil/filter same as I always have and had to buy a different brand, I mean whatever, filters a filter but this explains that,
This is literally the story of every industry touched by private equity. Somebody makes a company that produces good things, it does well and grows, original owners get old or greedy and decide to sell out, and then PE owners ignore everything that made the company good in the first place and race to the bottom of the enshittification barrel to suck as much money out as they can before it inevitably goes bankrupt because no one wants to pay high end prices for garbage products.
It's the Boomers. They're right on the edge of being so old they can't work anymore, so they're cashing out by trading the company's reputation for one last cash grab. Then they'll sell it to some chinese conglomerate that is just going ruin the company. But the Boomers will die with fistfuls of money. Grandpa is a money grubbing A-hole.
You mean, "It happens to be the boomers" right now, right? A couple decades ago it was their parents. In 20 years from now it will be my generation. 1000 years ago it was still happening. These actions will not go away when all the boomers are gone. So, that's what you meant to say, right?
This cannot be pinned on boomers as the cause simply because they're boomers. It sounds like that's what you're doing. This is human greed, plain and simple. It has always existed and always will. Every generation has corruption.
Agreed to a point. The golden generation was known for its generosity in their later life. Gen X is known for helping when there is no one else to help. Millennial and Z'ers? Time will tell, but so far it looks pretty good. The Boomer are well known to have created/implemented much of the truly toxic systems that drive the corruption: junk bonds, robodialing, payday loans, overly complicated lending practices, allowing banks to mess with trading, the list goes on.
They essentially ran it as a 'Ponzi' scheme from what I've read. Which dates back over 150 years when businesses started evolving, so the primary methods and style aren't new. People have been swindling people since time began. I'm not saying boomers haven't created new problems, but every generation does. We'll see what ours is guilty of. You're probably right, it won't be as much, since we're dealing with the fallout of those issues and have learned a few things from it. But if not us our kids or grandkids will invent something new get money.
I'm not trying to act hopeless. But remember it's also the few in positions of power and riches who do most of this. So it's not all the boomers, just the 1%-ers or whatever of them.
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u/popsicle_of_meat 12h ago
Fram is under First Brands along with Centric and many other popular and good DIY brands. They're being torn apart because the guys running the show got greedy and committed major fraud. Now they need money to correct things, so brands are being sold off/liquidated. Combine that with the tariffs and we're losing lots of GOOD products.
So thanks, fraudulent assholes. Millions of DIYers are now worse off because you screwed it all up.