Where Are They Now?

How many companies and businesses from your past are no longer around? I'm not talking about the mom and pop store or restaurant down the street but big companies. Many of these companies were huge Fortune 100, S&P 500, Dow Jones, pillars of our country. 

I'm talking about corporate giants like Kodak, Polaroid, Bell Telephone, Eastern, TWA, and Pan Am Airlines, Montgomery Wards, Woolworth's, Grant's, Kresge's, and Kress, RCA, and many others. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are still kind of around, but Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Mercury, Plymouth, DeSoto and Imperial have all disappeared in the last few years. American Motors (AMC) bit the dust a few years earlier.

I spent my entire career after college in the Information Technology profession. It was called Data Processing or the Computer Department when I started. I have worked on a large variety of computers made by several large companies and using many different programming languages. IBM was the equipment I started out on. That company is still around, but hardware is not their big money maker anymore. Burroughs, Digital Equipment, NCR, Amdahl, Sun, Mohawk, Compaq and others are all companies that no longer exist or are unrecognizable in their current form. Several other technology companies are completely different than they were a few years ago. Some just went out of business, others merged or were bought out by others.  

I also spent the vast majority of my career with two companies. They are both gone now. I started with First National Bank of Atlanta, which at one time was the largest bank in the southeast. I spent almost 15 years there. Not too long after I left they were bought by Wachovia Bank which itself was later bought by Bank of America and finally Wells Fargo. My small First Atlanta retirement pension/annuity comes from Wells Fargo. I spent most of the second half of my career with GTE. That was another 15 years. Before I left GTE it was already known that they would merge with Bell Atlantic to form what is now Verizon. I left just before that happened. One stop between First Atlanta

and GTE was American Heritage Insurance. which was a locally owned company in Jacksonville, Florida. It is now a division of Allstate. I also did some contract work and consulting for several banks in the southeast. There was Barnett, Sun Bank and a few others I can't remember. Speaking of banks, while working for First Atlanta one of my jobs was running a data center that did check processing and other services for 13 independent banks in south Georgia and north Florida. I don't think any of those banks are still around as independent entities. There are now about five very large national banking companies. Too bad, those local banks really did serve their communities. 

If I didn't know better I might think that I was a jinx. Several companies I worked for or with are gone. Hell, maybe it was my fault.

We are now used to companies, especially tech companies, popping up then disappearing or being bought out and absorbed. That wasn't always the case. Companies used to be around for decades and bragged about their longevity. First Atlanta could trace its roots back to 1865 and lasted until the Wachovia merger/takeover in 1985. Other companies remained the largest in their field and the field remained the same for many years.

Many more companies are around in name only and are only a shell holding company that licenses the name. One example is Pabst beer. Beer occupies a special place in my heart, also in my mouth and stomach. That name is owned by Pabst Brewing Company that also owns the rights to about 25 beer brands including Schlitz, Stroh's, Old Style, Lone Star, Schaefer, and others. This company does not own any breweries. They contract out the brewing and distribution. Here locally in D/FW, Pabst and Schlitz are brewed at the MillerCoors (another merged company) Brewery in south Fort Worth. At one time, Pabst and Schlitz were in the top five of the largest US beer companies. Kodak and Polaroid are now mostly licensing and patent shells.

I'm not complaining about most of this. Companies, like people, need to keep up with the times and adjust as time passes. I had to go through several technology changes to stay employable and relevant. Many of the defunct companies got fat and lazy. Some had terrible management. Others had their products become obsolete. Some were in industries that have been completely eliminated. The biggest problem with the decline and/or disappearance of these once huge and iconic companies has been the reduction or elimination of the retirement pensions for their workers. It can be devastating to those who have already retired or are too old to establish a new retirement nest egg. Amazingly the big shots who ran these companies, often into the ground, never seemed to suffer those financial setbacks.

Time marches on and companies will continue to come and go. Apple and Google won't be on top forever, just ask Microsoft. There will be huge companies in a few years that haven't even been formed yet. Who had heard of Facebook a few years ago? 

Maybe I'll go to Woolworth's tomorrow for lunch and a few sundries. Is the lunch counter desegregated yet?

wjh