It's wild to me how willing people are to torch their company's reputation. If you've seen some of the videos and comments around this it really seems like the corporate owners, and possibly the new franchisee, are arguably, for lack of a better descriptio0n, egotistical bullies, the "yeah? sue me then" types. They've probably gone their entire life just being a-holes and not being held accountable. And now they're digging their heels in.

The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability. The existence of a contract is in dispute. The franchisee's and corporate owner's positions seems to be that the contract is with the previous owner not the owner's store.

Well, if that's true, the LEGO collection still belongs to that previous owner and the new owner has simply stolen it. So their legal argument is ridiculous.

Allegedly that previous owner was basically kicked out of the store and denied the opportunity to take inventory so that owner probably has a case against corporate and the new owners as well.

There is no world in which this ends well for the company of the new store owner. And it's wild to me that they're sticking to their guns here. Beyond the legal issues, the reputational damage is massive. These stores are for LEGO collectors and they're screaming bloody murder. Plus ordinary people who hear about this story have an innate sense of fairness so immediately side with the people who've had their $200k LEGO collection effectively stolen.

Plus this now has so much publicity that there are any number of lawyers who will take on this case just for the publicity.

It's also funny that the Utah police who got involved when people went to corporate are basically just acting like corporate's security arm.