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As pandemic-related restrictions tightened across parts of Illinois last week, small-business owners in this Chicagoland suburb girded themselves for another round of losses, the Wall Street Journal reported. On Friday, restaurants and bars in four counties closed once more to dine-in service under mitigation measures announced by Gov. J.B. Pritzker because of rising COVID-19 cases in every region of Illinois. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot instituted a 10 p.m. nightly curfew for nonessential businesses and prohibited bars without a retail food license from serving customers indoors. Many businesses have endured multiple rounds of restrictions around the state, which are instituted whenever a region’s average COVID-19 positivity rate goes above an 8 percent threshold for three consecutive days. On Friday, Illinois health officials put half of the state’s 102 counties on a warning list because they triggered at least two state-set thresholds on indicators the state uses to determine where increased COVID-19 risk is occurring. On Friday, Illinois had 29,088 new COVID-19 cases in the last seven days, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It ranked second behind Texas for U.S. states with the highest number of new cases in the past week.

A group of creditors to J.C. Penney Co. is seeking to slow the sale of the bankrupt retailer’s real estate to another group of lenders, saying that it provides the buyers an undeserved windfall and reeks “of not only greed but abhorrent bad faith,” Bloomberg News reported. The objecting creditors, led by Aurelius Capital Management, say they submitted a $750 million competing bid for J.C. Penney’s properties that would provide $600 million more to the bankrupt estate and more evenly distribute proceeds among creditors. They’re asking Judge David Jones to order a separate process for the property sale to the so-called DIP lender group, while proceeding with the sale of retailer’s operations to its two biggest landlords. “The lure of a windfall has so clouded the DIP lender group’s judgment that its members are seeking value far in excess of their entitlements under the Bankruptcy Code,” lawyers for the dissenting creditors wrote in an objection submitted on Friday. J.C. Penney has been racing to wrap up the planned two-part sale of its assets as the crucial holiday season approaches. The retailer has said the deal will save more than 60,000 jobs. Under the agreement, J.C. Penney’s assets would be bought by a group of firms including H/2 Capital Partners that provided J.C. Penney with debtor-in-possession, or DIP, financing to keep it operating while in bankruptcy. The lender group would then sell the retail operations to mall landlords Simon Property Group Inc. and Brookfield Property Partners.

Guitar Center has begun to prepare for a potential bankruptcy filing that could come as soon as next month, the New York Times reported. The retailer missed an interest payment of roughly $45 million earlier this month, setting off a 30-day grace period that could end in default. The country’s largest retailer of musical instruments has reached out to creditors to discuss a plan that would involve the company filing for bankruptcy this year and emerging from it in early 2021. It’s still possible that Guitar Center could avert bankruptcy, as it did earlier this year when it resolved a skipped interest payment in April with a distressed debt exchange. That led to a downgrade by the credit ratings agency Moody’s in May, which noted that the transaction did not “fundamentally change” the company’s “untenable” capital structure. It was the third cut in the company’s credit rating this year.

Studio Movie Grill Holdings (SMG), the theater chain where film-goers can order Sriracha chicken sliders and a Cruzan mango mojito right in the middle of the latest blockbuster, filed for bankruptcy on Friday after the Covid-19 pandemic kept audiences away, Bloomberg News reported. “We plan to use this filing to strengthen our business by reducing liabilities and reposition SMG to emerge a stronger organization built for the future as we recover from the unparalleled impact of COVID-19,” Chairman Brian Schultz said in a letter on the company’s website. The outbreak forced SMG to temporarily close all its locations earlier this year. About a third of the company’s 33 theaters are still closed, according to its website; the rest are open for business as usual, it said. Secured lenders to the Dallas-based company agreed to provide a new loan to support its restructuring, according to the letter. Studio Movie Grill has assets between $50 million and $100 million and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million, according to its chapter 11 petition.

Investors are dumping bonds tied to the world’s biggest movie theater chain, betting that attendance will remain low despite venues reopening in major markets, the Wall Street Journal reported. The price on AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s $1.4 billion bond due June 2026 dropped below 10 cents on the dollar this week, according to MarketAxess, implying creditors believe they aren’t very likely to get paid back. The company’s $500 million bond due April 2025 was quoted around 60.5 cents on the dollar Thursday, down from 91 cents in early September. The declines contrast with the early-week bounce in AMC’s stock. Shares rose more than 16 percent on Monday following the company’s announcement that it would open a dozen locations in New York state at 25 percent capacity. A day later, the company said it would sell $50 million in shares to bolster its balance sheet.

Walmart Inc. sued the federal government in an attempt to strike a pre-emptive blow against what it said is an impending opioid-related civil lawsuit from the Justice Department, the Wall Street Journal reported. The retail giant said in a lawsuit filed yesterday that the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration are seeking to scapegoat the company for the federal government’s own regulatory and enforcement shortcomings in combating the opioid crisis. Walmart said the government is seeking steep financial penalties against the retailer for allegedly contributing to the opioid crisis by filling questionable prescriptions. The suit names the department and Attorney General William Barr as defendants, as well as the DEA and its acting administrator, Timothy Shea. It is seeking a declaration from a federal judge that the government has no lawful basis for seeking civil damages from the company based on claims pharmacists filled valid prescriptions that they should have known raised red flags. Walmart, which operates more than 5,000 in-store pharmacies in the U.S., said the government’s “threatened action would be unprecedented.” It said the government hasn’t alleged that the company was filling altered prescriptions, or that its pharmacists had inappropriate relationships with patients or doctors.

J.C. Penney believes it will emerge from bankruptcy protection before Christmas under a new ownership agreement that would save tens of thousands of jobs, the Associated Press reported. The beleaguered, century-old retailer said yesterday that it has filed a draft asset purchase agreement with the two biggest mall owners in the U.S. Substantially all of J.C. Penney’s retail and operating assets will be acquired by Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and Simon Property Group through a combination of cash and new term loan debt. Details of the deal that will save roughly 70,000 jobs and avert a total liquidation first emerged last month during a bankruptcy hearing. J.C. Penney, which even before the pandemic had struggled to compete with the likes of Amazon.com, Target and Walmart, became one of the largest retailers to file for chapter 11 protection this year amid a wave of store closures forced by the spread of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. The Plano, Texas, retailer will shed nearly a third of its stores in the next two years as it restructures, leaving just 600 locations open.

Ascena Retail Group Inc., the parent company of apparel retailers Ann Taylor and Lane Bryant, has received a new, higher stalking horse offer to buy the intellectual property, e-commerce business and other assets of its tween-oriented chain Justice out of bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The $44 million bid from brand management company Bluestar Alliance LLC trumps a previous $35 million offer from Premier Brands Justice LLC, an acquisition vehicle of apparel maker and distributor IHL Group. Premier’s offer for the Justice chain hadn’t been completed as the stalking-horse bid, meaning Bluestar’s higher bid now is the lead offer. Bluestar won’t charge Ascena a breakup fee if the deal falls through, compared with the $1.05 million breakup fee that Ascena would have had to pay IHL Group, a division of USA Apparel Group Inc. IHL’s portfolio of licensed brands includes Aéropostale, BCBG, Rachel Roy and Daisy Fuentes. Bluestar’s offer, unveiled in court papers Tuesday, includes reimbursing Ascena up to $200,000 in expenses for legal and other fees, less than the $450,000 negotiated with IHL. Founded in 2006, Bluestar manages more than 100 stores and over 300 licensees, including brands such as Brookstone, Tahari and Bebe, according to its website.

Ed’s Beans Inc., the parent company of Cranberry-based Crazy Mocha and Kiva Han Coffee, filed for chapter 11 protection this week, claiming it owes more than $4.75 million to more than 50 creditors, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Total assets owned by the company fall in the $100,000 to $500,00 range, according to the court filing. The petition, filed Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, indicates that the company’s biggest creditor, First Commonwealth Bank, is owed $2.4 million. The founder of Crazy Mocha, Ken Zeff, who sold the company two years ago to Ed’s Beans, is owed $685,000. Zeff started the company in 2000 and sold the chain in March 2018 to Ed Wethli, owner of Ed’s Beans. For years, the Pittsburgh-born coffee chain held its own against a national brand like Starbucks and several other independent coffee shops in the competitive Downtown market and beyond the city limits into the suburbs. COVID-19 turned the tables on Crazy Mocha and wreaked havoc on coffee shops across the country due to social distancing limitations and rules that were put in place to protect staff and customers from infection.

J.C. Penney Co. has formalized a planned sale to its bankruptcy lenders and biggest landlords, but must first finalize a staggering lease agreement in less than a week to close the deal, Bloomberg News reported. The retailer yesterday filed a draft purchase agreement detailing a plan to sell itself to mall owners Simon Property Group Inc., Brookfield Property Partners and its senior lenders. But the parties have until Monday to finalize a master lease agreement between the mall landlords and the lenders who will own most of the retailer’s real estate, Josh Sussberg of Kirkland & Ellis said in a court hearing on behalf of J.C. Penney. It’ll be a sprint to wrap up “what I assume to be one of the longest and most complex lease agreements known to mankind,” said Judge David Jones, who is presiding over the case. A lawyer for J.C. Penney’s biggest lenders echoed the sentiment, saying that it’s “beyond the most complex document I’ve ever seen” and has “so many open issues.” J.C. Penney is also facing a competing sale proposal from a smaller group of lenders including Aurelius Capital Management. That group has obtained financing commitments for a similarly structured deal at a “much higher and much better” price, Phil Dublin of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld said on behalf of the lenders. The current purchase agreement follows an arduous sale process that included marathon mediation sessions last weekend, Sussberg said, adding the parties agreed to the structure of the deal just after 6 a.m. Tuesday. Sussberg said he’s “highly confident” that “J.C. Penney’s future is secure.” The sale may save more than 60,000 jobs at the retailer, according to court papers.