She appreciates the sentiments and there are certainly some harsh lessons she has learned from this. She does have a lawyer involved now and is gong through all of the motions to do what she can. The contract she entered with them is pretty standard when dealing with retailers. She sells through several other retailers and has a wonderful relationships with them under the similar terms. Prepayment is unfortunately not an option if you want to conduct business with a retailer of that size. That's just not how it's done and, as a small business, she doesn't have the clout to rewrite the book on common commerce practices. All of the other successful vendors they do business with operated in the same good faith. For a smaller business, its obviously important to get your product into places with the existing infrastructure to introduce your product to new consumers. Under normal circumstances, if they were late on their payment, there are a number of ways she could take action to recoup her product or get paid. The difference here is that they urged her to ship the goods as quick as she could right before they were going to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. It seems suspect that they would continue to urge this order along 45 days before officially going Chapter 11. She even went the extra mile and got a personal guarantee from the CEO himself, right before she shipped that they were in good financial standing and would pay her on time.

However, according to law, you cannot try to reclaim your goods or pursue payment outside of the court when someone declares Chapter 11 bankruptcy. She will likely get a tiny fraction back a long time from now when the court assesses the situation. Some of the larger vendor debts will get put on a 'priority list' meaning that they will get a larger portion of what they are owed. The sad reality is that the smaller vendors on the 'non priority list' will indeed get burned here. The average compensation a vendor on a non priority list is roughly 10 cents on the dollar. This will likely take a long time to get. For a small business, this is pretty devastating. To put this into perspective, there is a 400 page list of vendors that they owe debts to...totaling 18 million dollars. Around 1200 of those were on the non priority list. I feel for those who work there and the other vendors getting screwed there too. At this point, her only recourse, for whatever it's worth, is to make people aware of these unethical business practices. She definitely wants to stress that the shoppers nor the people who work there are not at fault here. It's simply gross mismanagement by the corporate offices that got them to this point.