> The schedule times are more of a guideline: "You know you'll eventually get there, because there are one or two trains per hour in the big cities." If a train is canceled, you simply take the next one – ticket inspectors are used to this because the system adapts too.
That's a fine attitude when your trains run every 10 minutes, like intercities between Amsterdam and Utrecht do, but not when it's only once an hour.
I don't think there's any station in Netherland that doesn't have at least one train per hour.
I've had a train from Essen to Düsseldorf get cancelled at the end of Spiel! In Essen. Thousands of people had to get to Düsseldorf to catch the last ICE there. The replacement bus wasn't going to make it. I ended up paying a fortune for a taxi. And then the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced.
There's nothing about the German train system that's even remotely acceptable. It's not funny enough to call it a joke. It's a tragedy.
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.
If you search for "Bricks and minifigs", every result apart from their main website is about this controversy. One of the values of a franchise is the branding; at least for the forseeable future, this will be a negative value. For a company that serves a small niche community, this seems like suicide.
It seems they closed the store rather than give back the lego. That seems like a win of sorts, because I'm sure it hurts B&M to some degree, but it's not getting the stolen lego back.
I've now also seen part 2, in which the amount of police harassment that B&M seems to be able to bring to bear is absolutely disgusting.
The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.
It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.
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.
* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory
* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country
* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them
I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.
From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.
If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.
Corporate is lying a lot, and is pretty clearly guilty of theft at the very least.
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.
#1 is a bluff. It would be really hard to drag it out and judges hate that. You are much more likely to end up paying the costs of the little guy as sanctions than bankrupting them or whatever.
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.
And that is a serious problem. That means those people are easy to mislead, and can be made to believe anything if you just put it in an AI video. I've seen people get upset or feel touched by what to me were blatantly obvious AI generated videos. It's as if reality just doesn't matter anymore. (See also the state of politics lately.)
That's a fine attitude when your trains run every 10 minutes, like intercities between Amsterdam and Utrecht do, but not when it's only once an hour.
I don't think there's any station in Netherland that doesn't have at least one train per hour.
I've had a train from Essen to Düsseldorf get cancelled at the end of Spiel! In Essen. Thousands of people had to get to Düsseldorf to catch the last ICE there. The replacement bus wasn't going to make it. I ended up paying a fortune for a taxi. And then the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced.
There's nothing about the German train system that's even remotely acceptable. It's not funny enough to call it a joke. It's a tragedy.
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