How many overdue bills has RNDC left unpaid in its collapse?

Programming note: In lieu of Fingers’ regular coverage, below please find a special report double-feature. Also, after Buzzwords of The Week this Friday, I’ll be clocking out for the holiday, so no Weekender this Sunday. Hope you’re able to relax a bit over Memorial Day Weekend as well. Regular programming resumes next week, send tips if you got ‘em.—Dave.

In mid-April, a notice was posted on the door at 1621 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. The tenant of the ground-floor commercial unit near Fisherman’s Wharf owed some $56,000 in back rent, 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 here at 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 firesales 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.

Fingers needs your support to do more independent journalism.