Welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Thursday, January 15. In today's briefing, Saks Global’s bankruptcy filing revealed staggering debts to luxury brands after Richard Baker’s failed efforts to secure new capital or creditor support to keep the company afloat. And Genesis Healthcare has selected a roughly $1 billion winning bid in a reopened bankruptcy auction.

Chanel’s tab is $136 million. At Kering, the company behind Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, the bill is nearly $60 million. And those are just two of the many brands owed money by Saks Global—a list so long it stretched more than three pages in the bankruptcy filing that landed in a Houston court early Wednesday morning.

Even though the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman was plainly veering toward bankruptcy in recent days, the filing was stunning in its sweep and scale. And it made clear why Saks Global's executive chairman, Richard Baker, couldn’t convince bondholders that he should be the one to lead it through its restructuring.

For weeks, Baker—the architect of the $2.7 billion deal that put the two luxury retail heavyweights together just over a year ago—was scrambling to keep his creation afloat.

Genesis has identified a new winning bid at roughly $1 billion in a reopened bankruptcy auction. Genesis said in a court filing on Wednesday that it chose an entity known as 101 West State Street as the favored offer after five rounds of bidding on Tuesday. After subtracting certain costs, the winning bid is valued at $996 million, roughly $5 million higher than Genie 3’s $991 million proposal that set the floor for the auction.

A group of investors who bought bonds from Tricolor Holdings sued their bond trustee Tuesday, alleging it failed to stop "rampant" double-pledging of car loans as collateral.

Ellington Management Group, Clear Haven Capital Management and others filed a lawsuit in New York state court accusing bond trustee Wilmington Trust of failing to verify that Tricolor had delivered original loan documentation for the receivables backing $675 million of bonds.

Tricolor made car loans to subprime borrowers, often undocumented migrants without credit histories, and allegedly issued bonds to investors backed by car loans that were either double-pledged or didn't exist. —Andrew Scurria

Kayla Mederos adored her Roomba. She named it “WALL-E,” after Pixar’s trash-smashing space robot, and set it loose to collect the fur her yellow Labrador shed inside her Northern California home.

When WALL-E broke down, she returned it for a new one, only to see the same problem arise again and again. Finally, her brand loyalty exhausted, she switched to a robotic vacuum made by the Chinese company Roborock. It came with the preinstalled name of “Rocky,” which was kind of a bummer.

But it turned out her love was transferable. “Rocky is much quieter and does a good job,” said Mederos, a 36-year-old high-school teacher. “I’m very fond of Rocky.”

Connoisseurs of robotic vacuums say cheaper, fancier competitors have run circles around Roomba, which became better known for mishaps than clean floors.

Now the little sucker is broke. Roomba’s parent company, Massachusetts-based iRobot, declared bankruptcy in December and will be taken over by the Chinese manufacturer that is its main creditor.

Sales growth for U.S. retailers picked up in November, evidence that the consumer economy didn’t lose steam in the home stretch of last year.

Retail sales grew by 0.6% in November to $735.9 billion, an improvement from a slight pullback by shoppers in October, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting a 0.4% November increase.

In some ways, the economy now looks more fragile than during the post-pandemic economic boom, with more slack in the labor market and heightened uncertainty over changes in federal trade and immigration policy. Yet personal spending, which makes up more than two-thirds of the overall economy, hasn’t missed a beat.

Share your tips, suggestions and feedback with the WSJ Pro Bankruptcy team: Alexander Gladstone; Jodi Xu Klein; Akiko Matsuda; Alicia McElhaney; Andrew Scurria; Becky Yerak. 

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