I just don’t understand why a company with $95m in sales would steal $200k. That’s a fraction of a percent of sales for the year.
There’s now a boycott against them that will easily cost them more than that.
If the case is as this blog says, it cannot be hard to find a lawyer to do this one pro bono. Breach of contract is one of the few things in America where you can sue for your legal fees. If you take over a business you assume it’s contracts even though your name wasn’t on them. You gain anything the business owns but a consignment shop doesn’t own the inventory.
BAM is going to lose millions and for what? Is this article just wrong on substantial facts? Simple greed wouldn’t explain this as it will almost certainly lead to far less money, even in a short period, than returning it.
I have a family member who works in estate planning. From all the stories he's told me, a lot of wealthy people compulsively screw over people / refuse to follow the contract they agreed to / etc, simply because they can and know that it is too expensive for most people to file a lawsuit.
I agree with you. It makes no rational sense for the corporation to act this way. I can see how they end up losing a court case but can't explain why they don't pay up.
It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money. I expect the company had created strong incentives for employees to claw that back. Someone has followed those incentives against the interest of the corporation. This happens all the time although in this case they break the law.
Eventually there's a lawsuit and a lot more people get involved including people without any incentive to do illegal things. However those involved originally present some varnished version of the truth (to avoid getting fired!) the company trusts this version of events. They decide to fight the case in court.
Then they lose the case. Those who decided to fight it realise they made a bad choice and they now look bad too. It's at this point that the weirdest thing happens. Why do they choose to close the store instead of paying up? My guess is that it became personal for someone.
> It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money.
It did not, the franchisees simply wanted out because they were offered better paid work overseas.
They told corporate they wanted to sell the franchise back to them, as they say they wanted to recoup their investment in the franchise before they left the USA.
Corporate arrived the same day and started saying the franchise owes them $200,000, didn't inventory the franchise, terminated their franchise that day, seized the franchise that same day.
It’s a farcical notion that people are uniformly rational actors, as well as the notion that rational is adjacent to just.
It’s an unfortunate fact that many people in positions of wealth and power default to “F-you my lawyers will drown you and I will win” in every single case, regardless of merit.
Many times, that is the singular strategy that has put them in that position of wealth and power. Many times, they apply this strategy to every situation where they already possess an asset or service for which they have not paid, and that asset or service is valued higher than an ongoing good faith relationship with the person or entity that they owe for the asset or service that they received.
It’s a wholly predatory strategy but it can be a very rational calculus, and it can propel you to the very pinnacle of wealth and power. Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
I say this as a member of the owner class. I try not to be one of those people, but it’s easy to see justice as an unnecessary and frivolous expense. I’d estimate that a significant fraction of my peers are in this category, and nearly everyone else occasionally dabbles, often without even being aware of it as their lawyers push in that direction.
Ultimately, it’s a side effect of obscene inequality. I don’t know how to fix it, much less how to make the world somehow intrinsically just. IMHO there is no justice except the justice we go out of our way to create. Justice is not the natural state of the world.
I agree people and especially corporations act this way. Indeed many people believe that it's a corporation's fiduciary duty to lawyer up if that's expected to be cheaper than paying up.
Here, they are looking at small amounts of money, but they close a store, which presumably involves writing down an asset and forgoing future revenue. This only gives them a small chance of avoiding payment and risks the reputation of the entire firm.
The earlier decisions all fit the narrative of coldly rational, but I find the final decision to close the store doesn't fit. It's almost impossible to imagine how it ends well for the corporation.
It works extremely well which is why bullies and abusers use the tools they do.
Nobody wakes up as an adult and starts doing these behaviors. They have been these kind of maladjusted bullies for most likely their entire lives.
Since current US police forces are largely made up of these exact kind of people, and these people instinctively back each other up, the police also use these tactics to bully people they don't like.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that this nation loves a bully like Trump so much, we have spent decades supporting and elevating bullies to positions of power.
> Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
Even without the propaganda factor, its also surprising to plebs because there are plenty of plebs who try similar schemes and get their ass handed to them in the courts. Thievery is not an exclusive invention of the well-to-do. But being rich enough means you can actually afford a competent legal defense, which will delay the case out until the opposing party capitulates, because the cost of fighting[0] is far higher for you than them. This is the same reason why convicted felon Donald Trump is also on his second Presidential term. It turns out, you can outrun the long arm of the law, and most people are just not fast enough to do it.
It also doesn't help that the law is really out of shape. The US justice system is specifically optimized to get quick judgments against legally inexperienced defendants, mainly because they can't fight back. It's the same reason why housecats hunt and kill mice and small birds, and not, say, capybara or eagles. But all the features that make it really easy to hunt weaker legal prey also make it harder to take on big cases. Things like lawyers being stupid expensive and there being no fee shifting mechanism means weak defendants fold, but also that the government won't bother fighting tough cases. Which, again, shifts the risk of illegal behavior to the poor and unconnected.
[0] Oh no, I've started to channel the Lines on Maps guy.
lol. Yeah, being an a-whole isn’t the exclusive hobby of the wealthy, by a long shot. Crappy character, unlike the future, is relatively evenly distributed.
Because this isn't the first collection they've stolen from someone, presumably.
It's a lot easier to become a really successful company if you can keep your inventory costs down. Perhaps by investing in local law enforcement instead, to make sure no one looks too close at said inventory?
Donald Trump is famous for not paying even really cheap contractor bills, because he knew he could get away with it.
This is the answer. They thought they could get away with it. And from what I understand, they nearly did, because the original victim couldn't afford the risk of a lengthy and expensive lawsuit.
My take is that this all comes down to the stores being franchises.
Yes, franchisor hold a lot of power, and in the big picture the franchisees are small owners and a move like this ($200k of merch they haven't paid a dime for) can affect the PnL quite a lot on the local level. It seems like the average Bricks and Minifigs franchise store has annual revenue of just $600k. At that's revenue. Another search shows that their margins are around 10%-20%
If these franchise owners managed to pull of this, and sell the collection for $200k on top of the expected annual revenue, that would put their store margin for that year around 45%-55%!
I'm guessing Bricks and Minifigs, the corporation, just assumed this would fly quietly under the radar, and let their franchisees.
I think it just comes down to greed. A couple of franchisees figured they could make a killing, and become one of the most profitable franchise stores with no effort.
if the theft accusation is credible and not a rogue fuck up, then you wonder if a company that authorizes a $200k theft could have some other skeletons in the closet. like the sus $95mm sales claim.
Do you imagine someone got a stolen credit card, made a linkedin with that name, used the card to attend a live class under the fake ID, or are you just doing the classic hacker news aaaaactually?
Comments like this have ruined this site. We all know that’s never happened once in history.
If you care about the quality of the site, consider the guidelines about not responding to a bad comment with a worse one and not griping about how HN has gotten terrible or turned into reddit or what there you. Downvote, flag, and move on to better discussion, and you'll spend a lot more time engaging and contributing to good discussions.
Contributing to good discussions is the highest leverage way to promote the quality of the site. Spending time in poor discussions is what makes it feel like HN has gone to crap.
The odds that someone meaningfully reflects on their behavior when you tell them they're what's wrong with HN are pretty slim. You can substantially increase those odds by being more neutral about it.
It's entirely possible HN is dying, HN won't last forever and dang has said he is very concerned about the direction he sees the commentary going. But it's also entirely possible that the quality waxes and wanes primarily due to internal factors and that political tensions, AI bots and slop submissions, etc are external factors straining HN that will eventually be resolved.
Either way, the "real HN" I find is still here if you look for it, and I have always seen people on here who complain about the quality of the site but when you go to their comment history (I have not looked at your comment history to be clear) you see they're constantly getting into arguments and architecting a miserable experience for themselves. One's experience on HN is largely what they make it.
I don’t have one at the moment, at least for my circles (artisans, craftspeople, adult creators in general). Much of it has fallen back on PayPal for folks without an LLC to hide behind, or Square if they’re incorporated as a business. The trick has been discretion and operating in a gray area: “novelty goods”, “graphic design work”, and “outerwear” as item descriptors or db entries, obscuring the actual content without actually lying or deceiving the payment processor.
Most paypros, most of the time, won’t look too hard unless there’s a problem or you’re tripping some internal security measure (like raking in a lot of cash in weird amounts). Of late they’ve been more intrusive due to some weird eTeen puritans, but that’s quieting down again as they remember they like making money, and throwing legal content off their platforms can very quickly cause an exodus of customers looking to avoid having their funds seized.
That's pretty clearly deceiving. Would expect to run into problems with that kind of approach regardless of the specific payment processor -- everyone has T&C that you must follow.
Problems occur either way due to a lack of regulations on these entities allowing them to dictate acceptable financial transactions regardless of actual legality. Consider the risk matrix:
* You sell legal goods or services and are entirely honest about them to the paypro; if the T&Cs change down the line, your honesty makes you a prime target for having your funds seized and ability to process transactions terminated first, posing an existential threat to your business with no reward for your honesty
* You sell legal goods and services, but don’t volunteer extraneous details about them since that’s not the business of a paypro. Should the T&Cs change, your obscurity buys you time to adapt or seek alternatives before inevitably being caught up in the paypro’s internal surveillance measures.
* You sell legal goods and services, but assume your paypro is hostile from the get go regardless of the T&Cs and hand over the minimal information necessary to process a transaction. You have maximum time to find alternatives should the T&Cs change, because your baseline operations make it that much harder to identify your transactions down the line.
Honesty is inevitably punished while obscurity is rewarded, at least for a time. It’s also worth pointing out the hypocrisy of needling paypro users to follow arbitrary and changing rules of the paypro but allowing said paypros to reject legal transactions for whatever reason they wish or selectively comply with laws because they’re “fintech” and not banks or payment card networks: why should users face more onerous restrictions than the paypro themselves?
Ultimately the solution is the same one we’ve been parroting for years ever since PayPal arbitrarily changed their T&Cs to try booting adult creators off its platform: government regulations barring these entities outright from refusing any legal transaction. It’s part of the playbook at this point for tech companies in light of its success: court adult content creators and communities to grow the platform, then shut them out once there’s money to be made.
Well, fraud prevention requires them to block some transactions that are ostensibly legal right? To the extent that they can’t always tell if a transaction is fraudulent, any effort to fight fraud will block some number of legal transactions. And if it’s something they object to on moral grounds, they can probably always make a case (usually accurately) that the fraud rates are high.
For the first time in their history Google was finding themselves losing market share to ChatGPT. It wasn't a huge amount yet but it was clearly going to become one. That's what this is. The idea that the end user doesn't want this is preposterous. Those of us who make money off the web don't want this but the end user absolutely does.
This is going to happen whether Google does it or not. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
Most nonprofits don’t have a mission that would benefit from a transition or a trillion dollar product to sell. There would be no real way to profit they wanted to.
Geography prevents most people from exerting the form of control Iran has. It would be much more difficult for, say, Canada to control it. The Iranian coastline is pretty favorable.
Also, most governments are more susceptible to being bombed than Iran. They’ve been preparing for it for decades. If nearly any country (except for maybe a couple of Irans neighbors) tried, they’d be easily routed.
Oman is known as the "Switzerland of the Mideast" and has served as a trusted mediator in the region for a long time. Ostensibly, the Omanis have advised the US about the perils of attacking Iran, which is why no president before the current one was stupid enough to do it.
The US is the second largest foreign investor in Oman, and Oman is one of just 14 countries the US has a Free Trade Agreement with. US citizens can own a business in Oman 100% without a local partner.
Apple might not specify a time upfront but they do consistently support hardware for a good length of time. IPhones generally get OS updates for 5-6 years and security for at least a couple more.
I’ve never used anything they made long enough to get there.
There’s now a boycott against them that will easily cost them more than that.
If the case is as this blog says, it cannot be hard to find a lawyer to do this one pro bono. Breach of contract is one of the few things in America where you can sue for your legal fees. If you take over a business you assume it’s contracts even though your name wasn’t on them. You gain anything the business owns but a consignment shop doesn’t own the inventory.
BAM is going to lose millions and for what? Is this article just wrong on substantial facts? Simple greed wouldn’t explain this as it will almost certainly lead to far less money, even in a short period, than returning it.
Something must be missing.
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