A major company just filed for bankruptcy. Here's the order everyone actually gets paid in.

Originally reported as: “RetailCo files for court-supervised corporate rehabilitation amid mounting debt and creditor claims”

A well-known company filed for court-supervised rehabilitation after struggling for months to keep up with its debts, becoming the latest example of a business turning to bankruptcy protection rather than simply defaulting outright. Bankruptcy sounds like the end of the story, but it is really a legal process for sorting out who gets paid, and in what order, when a company can no longer meet all of its obligations. That order is strict and rarely intuitive to outsiders: secured lenders and employee wage claims generally get priority, ordinary creditors and suppliers come next, and shareholders, the company's owners, sit at the very back of the line, often left with nothing at all.