So I have been basically never moving my money out of my old jobs' 401ks because honestly job upheaval is so bad in this industry now, and a few days ago I got an email from an old job's 401k that the company was shutting down the 401k and I had to move my money out of it. So now I'm doing all the nonsense of getting a personal IRA set up and so forth
But I was curious about why this had happened, so I googled for news about the company, and yup, they have filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and are getting bought out by one of their former customers. Something that is still relevant to me about all of this is that what this company did was build and operate robotic micro-fulfillment centers for online grocery ordering. Their biggest customer when I was working there was Albertson's, which also owns Safeway and I think possibly some other big-name stores, but the former customer that bought them out was Woolworth's, a grocery chain in Australia. That means that the code that runs all of those micro-fulfillment centers now belongs to Woolworth's, and Woolworth's is probably unlikely to be interested in continuing to operate micro-fulfillment centers belonging to Albertson's, or other US grocery stores. I know for a fact that when I had been ordering groceries online from my local Safeway, they were in fact running their fulfillment robot off the code I worked on at that company, and during that time their online ordering system was actually amazing, and now they won't be able to do that anymore. My order last week was missing about $35 worth of stuff, which I did get refunded (and got a credit for the hassle, thanks Safeway), but I wonder now if grocery delivery is going to get noticeably more shitty for me because of this