CONFIRMED
This is the plain-language edition of the four-versions update. Same facts, same grade, none of the case or filing numbers, and nothing collapsed into boxes. Every claim below is stated again on the cited edition with the documents attached.
Over about seven weeks, the company made one factual claim four different ways, and every new version claimed less than the one before it. First the consignment deal was flatly against the contract. Then it was simply never in the contract. Then it was never approved. Then the claim disappeared altogether. Nobody ever posted a correction, and the second version is still sitting on the company’s website right now. Every sentence in that sequence is the company’s own, with a date on it, and each one is either archived, printed in the press, or filed in court by the company itself.
In its first statement about the Salem store, the company said consignment deals are “expressly prohibited under our franchise agreements.” That is a claim about what a contract says, and the contract can be read. Its services page, an exhibit in the fraud lawsuit the company’s own former franchisees filed against it and posted with this update, says franchisees “may also offer: consignment services… approved by us.” Permission with a condition is the opposite of a flat ban. Six days after publishing that statement, the company filed it in court as its own exhibit.
Two weeks later, a new statement dropped the word prohibited. Now consignment had “never been part of” the agreement. That page was captured by an internet archive the same day it went up, so its exact wording is locked. Nine days after that, one day after a big creator showed the contract’s consignment page on screen to a huge audience, the claim shrank again: now the company had just “never approved” a consignment as an authorized process. And in the company’s newest statement, the claim is simply gone.
A ban became an absence, the absence became an unused permission, and the permission became silence, with no correction at any step. The strongest version sits in the court file as the company’s own exhibit, and the second version is still published today, uncorrected, next to newer statements that no longer defend it. The paper trail is entirely the company’s own writing.
To be fair to the company: statements get revised for many reasons, including lawyers urging caution, and a shrinking claim does not by itself prove any single version was a knowing falsehood. The narrowest version might even be accurate on its own, since the contract does require the company’s approval and the company says it never gave one. None of this has been decided by a court, and the company is presumed to have acted lawfully.
Every document named here is linked from the cited edition of this update: the first statement as the company’s own court exhibit, the archived copy of the second, the press copies of the third, the newest statement, and the contract language. The newest statement’s full fact-check is here, and the earlier look at the consignment claim is here.
Primary sources, all public and all linked from the cited edition: the company’s four dated statements, the internet-archive capture, the contract page as displayed publicly, and the company’s own court exhibit.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam