CONFIRMEDMessages reconstructed from Bricks and Minifigs’ internal Slack, the workspace where the company and its store owners talk. Owner names and store locations are withheld; the wording is theirs.
This is the plain-language version of the cited update, written to be read out loud. The owners’ own words are quoted below, unchanged.
In July, a man who makes videos on YouTube, who goes by LUS, called three different Bricks and Minifigs stores on the phone, and a pawn shop too, and asked each one the same simple question. If I bring you my LEGO, what percentage of its value do you pay. He got three different answers. Then the people who own these stores watched the video, and in their own private group chat, they talked about what went wrong. What bothered them was not that three stores gave three different numbers. What bothered them was that one store gave a number at all.
Their company runs a private chat, like a group text for the whole chain, where the store owners and the head office talk. After the video, one owner wrote that they all needed to agree on one clear answer to give people, because, in the owner’s words, it really makes us look unorganized and like we have no idea what we are doing if stores are telling people completely different things. The same owner said the answers ranged from here is the percentage we offer, without even seeing the item, all the way to we cannot tell you what the offer will be unless it is in the store. Three stores called, the owner wrote, and no clear statement on how items are assessed and we come up with the prices makes the brand look messy and shady.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Faced with a customer asking a fair question, what would you pay me, the owners did not decide to give a clearer, more honest answer. They decided to give no answer. One of them wrote it plainly: this is why you do not give out numbers on the phone. Another said a twenty percent payout, one of the numbers a store had quoted, was way too low, and that they had sold at twenty percent exactly never. The fix they agreed on was not more honesty. It was more silence.
The owners did not have this conversation just anywhere. Their company keeps a chat channel set aside for videos like this one, and it named that channel, in its own system, tmp-youtuber social attacks. So when a customer records himself asking what a store will pay, the company files it under attacks. One owner dropped the video in with a note that now the stores are providing content, and to make employees aware. Another complained that the caller had picked on a store that had been open all of four days, where a brand new owner gave out too much.
A store that will not tell you what it pays until your LEGO is already sitting on its counter is a store that has taken away your ability to compare. That is not an accident, and it is not one clerk having a bad day. It is the answer the owners talked each other into, in writing, in a room named for attacks. The customer who asked a plain question got treated as the problem.
This site is independent. It is not owned by, run by, or affiliated with BAM. It quotes the owners’ own words, from their own chat, the way it quotes all its sources.
This is a plain-language retelling. The reconstructed messages, the exact quotes, and the links are in the full update. Nothing here is a finding of law.
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