What a shambles this is,one minute they are not the next they are going to honour the pre/orders,problem is this most people with bigger deposits and some that have paid the full amount have been told to go through there head office.

So now most people will have gone through that procedure and are frantically trying to source from other places and trust in this company will be Zero.

I chat with the local manager of my store and only a week ago he had to ring every pre/order customer and tell them they were not getting them and now they are��..Stupid but obviously good for the people that have not been refunded,guess they are having to go back and put deposits down again and all those customers will have to be given a phone call once again.//shambles but good news for the ones that could not get consoles from other places.

Still. All's well that ends well and if they do survive their current financial turmoil, it won't have hurt their reputation any.

Your joking mate the reputation is in tatters already and after this fiasco even worse,if you saw what i saw the other week with people with pre/orders turning up at my local Blockbuster angry with rage having a right argument with the manager i doubt you would think this.

So people with pre/orders have to go through some online form and have to pay in full for there consoles,does this mean that this has nothing to do with Blockbusters or what ?

I don't know the legal position, but I think companies going into administration should not be allowed to take down payments. They will want to of course, because it's usually cash flow problems that has gotten them there in the first place, but as it appears they are allowed to do so, things like this will unfortunately always happen.

I remember when MFI went into administration. They were still taking deposits a week before it was publicly announced. I don't know if that's legally acceptable or not (probably, knowing the corporate bias that exists in modern government) but a lot of people laid out 2-3k for kitchen deposits they would likely not have, had they known the company's woes.

A few months later and the upper echelons of management were running a seperate "discount warehouse" type operation, selling off the old stock. Go figure.

In reply to a post by mrnelster:

As much as I would like to believe this was a pre Christmas human interest story, I expect the administrators have agreed some form of commission payment for the sales completing.

I suspect there is an element of everyone wins here.

The customers get a chance to buy the products they'd pre-ordered from Blockbuster and their Sale of Goods Act 1979 rights will be exercisable against a company with a more secure long-term future than Blockbuster (though it's still a good idea to pay by credit card if possible in order to gain section 75 Consumer Credit Act 1974 rights).

Sony, Microsoft and their agents will get to retain most if not all of the profit element of the price that would have gone to Blockbuster.

Blockbuster and their Administrators have less customer anger to handle, can save a little more goodwill and may well be getting a one-off payment from Sony and Microsoft for entering into this scheme and/or a small commission for each pre-order passed on (or possibly for each sale that completes). Any payments received are unlikely to be anything like the profits Blockbuster would have received had they continued to trade normally, but it's better than nothing and discharges the Administrators' obligation to secure maximum value.

Does this not highlight the advantage of paying for things with a credit card, in a situation like this you should be able to phone the card company and have them get the money back for you.

Edited by astateoftrance (Wed 06-Nov-13 09:47:52)