The unfortunate loophole here is that, potentially, by shutting down that franchise in a bankruptcy the corporation may end up being preferred for being made whole on debts relative to the consigner. Bankruptcy is complicated so while I am pretty sure any remaining goods from the consignment would be returned to the original owner the proceeds from sales that were successfully made might end up in the pocket of the corporation.
Personally, I absolutely loathe consignment. It is an incredibly complex agreement with a lot of weird edge cases about deprecation of goods and the duty to seek a good price that get complex quick. If you have goods like this and can find a store that will buy your goods in bulk you should be very careful in considering how much you care about the price difference between that bulk price and the percentage they list for consignment. A single transaction is usually much cleaner and easier for both sides and in this case (trying to pay for medical costs) having the money immediately can be quite attractive.
All of which contradicts the current corporate response
the reckless ben youtube videos are pretty clearly laid out with contracts, video evidence, etc..
the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out until you’re broke from lawyers fees. we’re a lawyer rich corp and you’re not. they don’t even try to hide it.
bricks and minifigs are just crazy dickens movie tier evil it’s crazy.
To my experience this is a common strategy in disputes when the corporate party has people who operate as uncivilized brutes. I think it's part of the McKinseyfication of companies - profits at all cost - and here's the playbook.
My personal experience is from private parking control. Rather than be professional about my reclamation, their first response was "only criminals dispute these and we win all the court cases".
So I think trying to be imposing and villanous to scare the other non-corporate party to back off is a common global corporate playbook in situations in matters where companies enter contractual complex space with individuals.
You either need to pay the sales price of the consigned items, or just give them back.
If you do neither, its the same exact thing as theft. Which is what they did. They took possession of the 200k lego set with no reimbursement. Just plain ol' theft.
Reminds me of the whole "disney must pay" debacle.
“Authors Have Formed a Task Force Because Disney Refuses to Pay Them”
https://bookriot.com/disney-must-pay-task-force/
> Authors like Neil Gaiman have formed a task force to fight for the royalties Disney has refused to pay for Star Wars and other tie-in novels.
If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.
On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.
Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.
However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.
>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.
Depreciation: not going to happen on Star Wars sets that are not longer in production.
Water damage: Lego is water proof.
Breakage: being easy to take apart and put back together is Lego’s core principle.
Edit: wait, the whole collection was sealed and new in box. Yea, just water damage to those boxes would cut the value by at least 10%. Collectors are picky as shit.
I didn't realize people bought Lego to leave in the box. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because it's a common thing for collectors to do in other hobbies.
1. Even if the original consignment contract was poorly drawn up without a clear exit clause I think it'd be reasonable to expect a resolution somewhere close to this in mediation.
So you "absolutely believe" something that was already proven false, and which you would know if you had even _skimmed_ the facts.
I thought it was interesting to, from the assumption that the corporation actually banned consignments, still work through how it doesn't free them from wrong doing. Even in the best light B&M has acted in bad faith.
If you're talking about the corporation I think that any sensible neutral party would probably come down on the side that the corporation has no entitlement to those goods.
If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible. The proceeds from sold goods are likely a more complicated answer since money is fungible and divisible. I could accept that there would be scenarios where a steward would think that the corporation should recover a portion of the proceeds.
https://www.cozen.com/news-resources/publications/2020/is-yo...
regardless of the law, it’s a very stupid move on the company’s part.
if they had half a brain they’d pay double the commission and pretend it aas internal miscommunication. $40k is cheap versus the pr hit they’re taking right now
The bigger problems I see here are:
1. You can't really sure large corporations like Bricks & Minifigs. They've got deeper pockets and can drag it out until you go bankrupt. There's no good legal recourse for this, meaning larger corporations can basically do whatever they want and ignore the law, as long as they only hurt people smaller than them.
2. The police refuses to treat this as the theft it is. There have been several confrontations with police that give a very strong impression that the police is corrupt and protecting the Bricks & Minifigs and its crimes.
3. Reckless Ben's questionable shenanigans seem to be the only way to fight for justice in unequal situations like this. The offending franchise is now closed. The victim still doesn't have his lego or money back, but thanks to Ben, Bricks & Minifigs is now also feeling the pain. Without that, they would have simply gotten away with it. Chance are they've done stuff like this before.
Also interesting are some of the stunts Ben has pulled:
1. Confronted with the claim that it's a civil matter, he tried turning it into a crime, by holding a raffle for one of the stolen sets that's still legally owned by the victim. The winner of the raffle went to pick it up, and was refused, making it theft from a lottery, which is a crime that the police is supposedly required to investigate (they didn't).
2. Several people buy $10k worth of lego from the victim and claim it from the shop. When they're refused, they go to small claims court, which is now possible because it's only $10k. Bricks & Minifigs ignored it and closed the shop instead. There are default judgements in favour of the people helping the victim, but there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce them.
3. He went out of his way to get the company to sue him, which is apparently better than him suing the company? I'm not sure why. But Bricks & Minifigs didn't bite.
The most effective thing has simply been the PR. The public attention may finally get law enforcement to investigate and punish Bricks & Minifigs. Or at least the broader public will know and avoid Bricks & Minifigs, so at least the company gets punished financially. That won't help the victim, but at least it would be some measure of justice.
This is also straightforward enough and enough evidence exists that it would be hard to drag it out.
You definitely can sue a large corporation and win or force a settlement. The “we’ll drag this out until you are bankrupt” thing is more bluff than reality. Courts do not react favorably to that. Especially when they have direct evidence of those threats.
A corporation may have a litigation cost advantage, but they’re still going to spend more than the $180k or whatever that they owed to execute this drag it out forever strategy.
But the store closed to get out of paying.
Which makes no sense if the store was corporate-owned. So why isn't the corporation paying?
The money in question here is the proceeds from selling a collection valued at 200k - the recovery (unless you start to get into punitive territory) is likely to be rather meager... and it's a large risk so there may be few bites on firms willing to take it on purely commission.
Is there not potential grounds here for punitive damages? The false police reports and harassment seem egregious even by corporate standards.
And the corporation is valued at $400 million, so it's not like the pot isn't sweet enough
That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.
Unless the contract was written so poorly this didn’t happen?
Whats the other side in this? Feel bad for the 400 million corp with their army of lawyers? Feel bad for the store owners who scammed the person and acted like a total dick? Honestly, whats your take on this?
The difference between you and the person you replied to is that, despite neither of you knowing what the other side is, the other person was curious to learn it instead of assuming they know everything and attacking.
Is an attack on the credibility of the writer.
> The police, for their part, kept calling it a "civil matter" and declining to investigate. Every single time.
On the other hand...
> In a subsequent conversation after the store closure and lawsuit loss, when Ben indicated the logical next step was to pursue Johnson personally, Josh's response, according to documented accounts, included the threat: "If you try to pursue me legally, YOU stole the LEGOs."
> Shortly after that conversation, someone called in a police report claiming Reckless Ben was transporting heroin.
This is a strange choice by Johnson, since it instantly transforms the civil dispute into a criminal offense.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-bryan-recover-his-lego-colle...
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
The store says the full inventory was not discoverable at the store. They said the person gave a written statement in the past saying the collection was "moved off site for security reasons" so I don't think this is really as cut and dry as the YouTuber and blogger people are trying to make it look.
> Corporate says, "this is mine now"
Their statement says they located what inventory they could and offered it back.
I think there's a lot more to this story. I wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story.
This does seem like a very key point that keeps getting ignored for the sake of a simpler story.
Everyone keeps talking about this lawsuit loss, but what lawsuit? Against whom? The article doesn't even explain, but it's starting to look like the lawsuit was against the former owners, contrary to the ragebait "Bricks and Minifigs stole..." title
Here's a video from the previous owners explaining their story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0
Now as for the previous question of who was at the pointy end of those default judgments, I haven't been able to find that answer. I assume they should have named the local franchise as an entity and it's owners individually. Closing the store to avoid paying is arguably a fraudulent transfer of assets, but that would need to be taken to court in an enforcement action.
It is my understanding that BAM took direct ownership of the local store and therefore the small claims case was also directed against them, but at the moment I can't find where I've heard that so I'm not 100% sure.
It's really depressing to see to be honest.
Without being able to run up Ed/Ben's legal costs, trying to defend these suits at all is just a further loss for B&M for no benefit.
I don't think it was the deciding factor, but Ben also sent a fake Guinness award to the store around the same time they were being served. It is within the realm of possibility that they thought Ben was bluffing with the lawsuits and tried to call his bluff just to find out it was all real after they failed to appear.
Legal costs for a small claims suit is tiny, and would be easily doable for them if they could win it. Again, there is a reason they lost those cases.
Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.
Bricks and Minifigs? Or the previous owners?
Do you mind citing your sources at least? The linked article refers to a "lawsuit loss" but doesn't explain who it was against or what it was for.
I'm not defending anyone. I'm saying the claims don't line up
> I will not do your work for you. Everything I said is true and easily searchable, feel free to look it up.
Everything I quoted was from me looking it up!
Again, if this is your knowledge after looking it up, then refrain from commenting, as your intelectual limitations will inevitably lead you to make false claims.
EDIT: as other commenters point out, BAM actually did lose the lawsuit over this and now the issue is the consigner is trying to collect the judgment. In that case it would normally be irrelevant that the store was a franchise location, because BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least). With deep pockets BAM could drag out the collections process long enough to try an extract a settlement from the consigner; the risk with doing so though is that interest accrues on the settlement at statutory rates that are normally higher than market rates and they face the possibility of court sanctions for any attempts at delay that have no reasonable legal basis.
What if he reported theft? Wouldn't they have to prove how did they come into possession of the goods they are selling?
It is theft!
FWIW, I couldn't follow it either from the blog.
There is no need for us to accept your sociopathic assertion that the rich should and will win.
This appears to be in dispute.
As per bricks and minifigs:
>It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
>A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition.
It appears they are alleging that the prior operator had sold a larger portion of the consigned goods than they had claimed to the family.