In mid-April, a notice was posted on the door at 1621 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. The tenant of the ground-floor commercial unit near Fisherman’s Wharf owed nearly $57,000 on the lease, the bulletin claimed. Behind the plate-glass windows sat a vacant office space with taupe floors and stark white walls interrupted only by maroon block lettering that matched the logo on the door. “RNDC,” it read.
Photos of the document — officially known as a notice to pay security deposit or quit — were snapped earlier this week by a longtime tipster who preferred to remain anonymous. The listed representative for the lessor, Young’s Holdings, Inc. (a vestige of Young’s Market Company, which RNDC acquired in 2022 to fulfill its doomed West Coast ambitions) declined to discuss the status of the five-figure debt when reached by phone late last week, citing company policy. A separate inquiry sent via the contact form on the company’s website was not returned before publication. The San Francisco property is just one of several listed on Young’s Holdings’ website; many of the addresses correspond to RNDC’s since-abandoned California operations, corroborating my previous reporting that the acquiring firm had leased much of its infrastructure in the Golden State.
If RNDC’s West Coast landlord is still trying to collect on the failed mega-wholesaler’s debts before it fully collapses, it’s certainly not the only former business partner in that position.
In June 2025, Republic National Distributing Company shocked the beverage-alcohol industry with an unprecedented “withdraw[al]” from the California market spurred on by successive defections of major suppliers (Brown-Forman Corporation, Tito’s Handmade Vodka) and brands (High Noon Sunsips, Cutwater) earlier that spring. I broke the news at VinePair, then Fingers tracked the unprecedented musical-chairs-style summer scramble as distillers and winemakers in RNDC’s portfolio in the Golden State tried to line up alternative routes to market before the September sayonara.
As messy as the Cali catastrophe was for the distributor — at that point, a 39-market empire second only to rival Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits in the country’s non-beer middle tier — in its own right, it presaged a much messier demise to come. Since September 2025, RNDC has hemorrhaged bigtime wine and spirits supplier contracts and wound down the vast majority of its distributing operations via joint-venture exits and fire sales to a half-dozen competitors. By my count, it retains control of fewer than five of the markets it held as recently as 2024.
Like the suction from a sinking ship dragging survivors in the water to their doom, RNDC’s dramatic and sudden decline has created a maelstrom of consequences for those in its orbit. It laid off thousands of workers in California, and has pink-slipped thousands more as it prepares to offload the rest of its markets. Some may be eligible to re-interview for their jobs at the acquiring wholesalers; the rest will be cut loose in some of the choppiest seas the contemporary bev-alc trade has ever seen.
RNDC’s remaining suppliers — the hundreds upon hundreds of mostly small, mostly wine or spirits brands that had contracted with the wholesaler for distribution across the country before it began coming unglued last year — face a parallel conundrum as they wait to see whether new owners in this or that market will keep them in the book and give them the service they need to survive. In the meantime, like RNDC’s one-time landlord in San Francisco, some of them are just trying to get paid out on overdue bills before the music stops.
(If you’re a supplier or vendor waiting on overdue payments from RNDC, please get in touch by emailing [email protected] or texting dinfontay.11 on Signal. Anonymity available.)
“It’s well into the six figures,” a current RNDC supplier said earlier this month, estimating the amount of money their business is owed in unpaid invoices. (Like every supplier interviewed for this report, they requested anonymity out of fear that RNDC or a successor would punish them for speaking out by delaying overdue payments further, or indefinitely.) Earlier this year, they stopped shipping product to the wholesaler because they didn’t have the cash to continue purchasing inputs and meeting production payroll without remittance. This has only compounded their problems.
“Not only are we waiting to be paid the monies that they owe us, but the fact that we’ve not been sending inventory to them means we’re losing customers, because naturally, we can’t expect [retailers] to hold on for too long,” they said. Without payment soon, their business is on the verge of failure. They have laid off their production staff and are seriously considering closure. “We might pay next month’s rent,” they said, “but beyond that, we’re not quite sure what we’re going to do.”
Companies in RNDC’s rapidly shrinking orbit have been sitting on this knife’s edge for a while. In mid-January, I obtained a memo purportedly sent by MHW Ltd., a longtime New York importer of wine and spirits, notifying its own customers that it was “temporarily holding new PO requests from RNDC as they have become slower to pay and their responsiveness has declined to a point that is not acceptable.” A spokesperson for the importer declined to address the memo directly via email at the time, citing client confidentiality, but told me “MHW has internal credit review processes that are mandatory and routine practice.”
It’s not clear how many unpaid bills RNDC has left in its wake as it falls apart, nor the total outstanding balance. The company has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the matter sent over the course of months. I have spoken directly with half a dozen suppliers to RNDC this year about nonpayment issues; interviews with former employees, as well as ongoing social-media chatter, suggest the figure is much higher.
One former RNDC California worker says this issue predates the wholesaler’s exit from that state. “I was hearing from suppliers that they weren’t being paid out on like, [quantity discount] funding, they weren’t being paid out on scan incentives,” they recalled in a phone interview last week. (Fingers has granted them anonymity to speak candidly while under a nondisclosure agreement with the company.) “We were taking cases from these suppliers and never paying them.”
This former employee emphasized that because they were not in RNDC’s finance department, it was hard for them to say with any certainty how widespread the nonpayments were in California, much less the rest of the country. But remittance timelines seemed to vary “depending on the supplier and how big their bark was,” they recalled. Large multinational suppliers that had had near-national contracts with RNDC “can obviously make much bigger waves if they want to start throwing their weight around,” the first former employee said. “So those guys weren’t as heavily impacted, but the smaller suppliers that were maybe only with RNDC in a handful of states, or maybe in some cases just California, they got screwed.”
Another former RNDC employee from outside California, this one with direct knowledge of its accounts payable division, corroborated this big-get-paid/small-get-screwed dynamic. “I can tell you the overdue payments are coordinated at the tippy top and very much on purpose,” they told Fingers via social-media message. (They’ve been granted anonymity to speak without fear of retaliation.) “The small suppliers that have the best chances of getting paid are the ones that send ‘legal letters.’” This former employee declined to clarify further on the nature of that correspondence, but estimated the total number of suppliers waiting on remittances was “far greater” than the cohort that had contacted me.
Even as it has imploded, RNDC’s leverage over these smaller wine and spirits firms remained significant because of its sheer size, and the fact that in some markets, it is the only real show in town. Another supplier who contacted me via email in February to complain about some $30,000 in unpaid invoices reached for their own sinking-ship metaphor to sum up the double-bind: “We don’t want to leave them but also don’t want to be the last one on the Titanic.”
“We thought it was safe to align with a larger distributor,” a third supplier told Fingers in a text exchange that began in early 2026. With RNDC past due on some $70,000 worth of invoices, they were starting to worry. This had never happened before, but as a small firm, they couldn’t afford to keep sending product without getting paid for it. When we spoke again in mid-February, the supplier said some payments had trickled in, but a large balance of overdue invoices remained. “They have continued to give us purchase orders so that’s when we decided to change payment terms to ex cellar,” a clunkier arrangement in which they began only releasing product from their warehouse upon seeing RNDC’s payment hit their account.
Some suppliers have seen payments pick up since RNDC entered its deal-cutting endgame in earnest. “Two week[s] ago they paid all the invoices that had been due in 2025,” a fourth supplier emailed me in early May. “So no[w] they owe us invoices due starting in January of [20]26 — with the oldest being over 120 days late.” They’re hoping that now that less precarious firms either already have, or soon will, take over from RNDC in most of its markets, they’ll be made whole on the ~$30,000 worth of invoices still outstanding.
Then again, they say it’s the hope that kills you. In an email Tuesday evening, that supplier told Fingers RNDC’s arrearage had begun to creep north of $30,000 again. “They haven’t made any more payments since April,” they wrote.
A version of this article originally appeared in Dave Infante’s independent newsletter, Fingers.
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