Can anyone explain WHY a 400M company would do this? This is just bonkers. They are destroying their reputation for $200k of legos???

Why would a billion-dollar company pay their employees so little that they need assistance to live? Or need to urinate in a bottle to keep their delivery times up? Greed and a belief that the rules don't apply to them.

You should watch the two videos if you haven't because it's full of jewels. The kind of conversations and plays recorded point to a pattern. This is not their first time doing something shady, they think they can get away with it, and they greatly underestimated Ben determination and resources. "are you stupid?", "you stole them", "i swear to god i'll return them if you send me first a false apology/confession" are some of the things these BAM people said to him. Again, the video is really fun to see, you get secret cameras on these guys, police bodycams with redactions undone, plenty of legal stunts, and a healthy amount of human misery documented.

The likely explanation is not that they are stupid, but that they are actually being rational and they can do this often and get away with it.

A $200k loss isn't much in the context of the whole company but it may be a very large amount for an individual franchise, and they want to set an example.

Think of it like a restaurant chain pursuing legal action against an internal theft ring at a single location.

(I am not taking the BAM side here, just providing a rationale for their actions).

Someone at a lower level probably a regional director, noticed that a franchise owed them a debt, took inventory from the store as payment of the debt, and when all this blew up and he realized he needs to give the inventory back, he doubled down bc otherwise he'd need to record a $200k loss on that franchise

Keep in mind you are getting one side of the story. The company seems to be claiming that the franchisee sold the sets and (perhaps) did not pay the consignor for the sales. And that the consignor moved his sets out of the store.

> That said, after ownership of the Salem store changed, we thoroughly documented and assessed current inventory. A few days later, we became aware of the previous arrangement, and compared our inventory assessment to the limited documentation provided by the consignor. 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. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.

More money & power than sense. Hubris, greed, malice, psychopathy. One, some or all of these combined in various proportions.