Sears skips payments to vendors amid bankruptcy concerns

[Freddie]

2. I worked accounts payable for a company like that

They had big $$ problems and the folks upstairs decided the solution was to not pay the bills, or only pay the vendors that threatened to stop shipments or legal action. As one of the AP team we were in the front line of abuse. This was in the days before email and the phone would ring constantly. You could set your watch to noon when the west coast vendors would start calling (3 hr time difference). You know how ER docs and nurses develop a kind of black humor about what they see, we started getting the same way, joking around with the folks on the phone since a lot of them realized we were just the peons doing the masters’ bidding. One time one of the team broke her ankle (at home) and the joke was that a vendor got her in the parking lot.
When the folks upstairs fired our nice and understanding boss and replaced him with a martinet, most of us bailed including myself. The company got bought out and the new people settled with the vendors, mostly for pennies on the dollar. The entire management team (including martinet boss) was shown the door and those peons that were left kept their jobs. This was during the Reagan Recession, early 80s.