I haven’t paid attention to IHOP since college and I’ve never been to Applebee’s, but it still caught my eye that IHOP is making a bid to buy out Applebee’s. Their CEO, Julia Stewart, used to be an Applebee’s exec, which must be helping things along. The $25.50 per share bid comes to $1.9 billion plus IHOP will assume $155 million of Applebee’s debt. The company will partially make up that huge $2 billion debt by selling company owned Applebee’s to franchisees. Stewart took over IHOP in 2002 and the stock has gone up 75% since then.