LUS called three stores asking what they pay. In a channel named #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks, the owners said the problem was the store that answered.
PRIMARY SOURCEMessages reconstructed from Bricks & Minifigs’ internal Slack, the workspace where the franchisor and its store owners talk. Owner identities withheld.
In the third week of July, the YouTuber LUS cold-called three Bricks & Minifigs stores and a pawn shop and asked each one the same thing: what percentage do you pay for a collection. He got three different answers. The owners of the chain watched it, and in two of their own Slack channels, they worked out what had gone wrong. It was not that three stores quoted three different numbers. It was that one store quoted a number at all. And in explaining why that was the mistake, they put the pricing machine on the record, in their own words.
First, in #forum_miscellaneous
Then, in #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks
A second owner shared LUS’s posted video into the channel the company keeps for exactly this, one it named #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks, with the note “now us stores are providing content… please make employees aware.” The replies are where the machine gets described.
The part they were trained not to say
Read the third owner’s message. Writing to the other owners, they say a colleague “did miss speak saying the percentages was set by corp and we all pay the small margins.” The complaint is not that the statement was false. The complaint is that it was said. When another owner offers the new store “grace,” the third owner clarifies: the store “could benefit from a little more training.” Training in what. Not in pricing, and not in honesty. In not saying the percentage out loud.
That is the whole machine, described by the people who run its stores. Corporate sets the percentages. The margins are small. And the rule the owners describe is not to tell a customer what the percentage is: “this is why you don’t give out numbers on the phone,” “we never give hard %s,” and if pressed, a range so wide it is “useless.” One owner calls the whole thing what it is from the customer’s side: “messy and shady.”
CORROBORATEDYesterday this site published the actual buying calculator BAM distributes to its stores, publicly downloadable from BAM’s own site. It sets the store-credit and cash percentages by formula, and BAM’s own store policy says “we cannot give out itemized lists.” The owners above confirm the same two facts from inside: corporate sets the percentages, and the trained rule is never to state them.
“We’ve all agreed”
There is one more line worth stopping on. The reason the owners give for the no-numbers rule is not that a phone quote might be inaccurate. It is this: “the standard ‘we don’t give quotes out over the phone’ response that we’ve all agreed to use to keep customers from bid shopping all over town (necessary when there are 15 stores here).”
These are separate businesses. Bricks & Minifigs sells itself, and its stores describe themselves, as independently owned. Here, owners of those independent stores describe an agreement among them to give customers no price, specifically so that a customer with a collection to sell cannot call around and compare what different stores would pay. That is what “bid shopping” means, and preventing it is the stated purpose. It is the same coordination the company’s own operations manual sets up when it lets stores within two hundred miles of each other agree on a common price, now described by owners as a practice they “all agreed to use.”
INFERENCEThe owners’ words are primary. Reading “we’ve all agreed” as a coordinated practice among independently owned stores, and connecting it to the manual’s regional-pricing provision, is our analysis. We do not assert any specific violation of law; that is for a regulator to weigh.
What this is, and is not
To be fair, and it matters. These owners are not neutral witnesses. They are annoyed at LUS, they call him obnoxious and say he “didn’t even get real offers,” and their stated worry is that inconsistent answers make the brand look bad. Their instinct to protect a margin is ordinary; every business wants to buy well, and the manual is candid that a store “is not a non-profit.” This is a handful of owners across two channels; Bricks & Minifigs has more than two hundred stores, and a Slack thread is a mood, not a measurement. We have withheld the owners’ names, their stores, and the exact timestamps, because these are people still inside the system who did not choose to speak publicly, and the point of publishing this is not to expose them. Nobody here is accused of a crime, and neither the owners nor this site is making one. What the threads show, and all they show, is that the people who run the stores say the same thing the company’s own tool says: corporate sets the percentages, the margins are thin, and the customer is never meant to be told the number.
Sources: messages reconstructed from Bricks & Minifigs’ internal Slack channels #forum_miscellaneous and #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks, with owner identities, store locations, and exact timestamps withheld; LUS’s video, “I Called 3 Bricks & Minifigs Stores… and 1 Pawn Shop… SHOCKING RESULTS,” is public. Related, published yesterday: BAM’s own buying calculator, and the “dust collector” button. See also how the pricing is set and what the owners say to each other about headquarters.
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