I received a lot of messages about the item here concerning Souplantation not making good on its gift cards. Most of them said something like what Karl Kuras wrote in this e-mail to me…
Long time fan of the blog and kid who grew up on the D&D cartoon and Garfield and Friends.
I'm also a lawyer who practiced bankruptcy law for many years. The Souplantation peoples' hands are probably tied on the refunds. Once a person or company (yeah, the Supreme Court thinks they're one and the same) begins to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings they are barred from paying any of their creditors.
The "court" they refer to is probably the bankruptcy court which will determine the priority of debtors and whether enough funds are left for the repayment.
I'm the last person to defend corporate America but this is sadly the best they can do under the circumstances.
No, I think they could have said something like, "We really appreciate all of you customers who bought gift cards and we wish we could somehow redeem them. But we're plunging into bankruptcy proceedings here and they're governed by laws that take most of that out of our hands. If it turns out there's any way we can make good on those cards, we will." They could have been much nicer about it.
I also seem to recall that there was some restaurant chain years ago that went outta business but still arranged with some other chain to offer something to gift card holders. The other chain wanted to see if they could inherit some of the loyal customers of the going-outta-biz firm so they offered to honor not the face value of the gift cards but some percentage up to a certain amount.
I knew about how bankruptcy court takes over in these situations. I was just amazed at how callous that second paragraph was towards folks who'd paid good cash for those gift cards and will probably never see a nickel on the dollar. The soft-serve frozen yogurt at Souplantation should have been that cold.