I had this supervisor last week. I had filed some of my claims earlier, then called back to complete the remainder and got this guy. He would not accept the fact that somebody had to tell the system what to do, he could not explain why the policy had changed since my earlier filing, and denied that he had the authority to override the system (as other supervisors had done). I asked to speak to the manager…he said they were all busy but I absolutely would get a call back. I didn’t get the call, but noticed the next day the charge had been credited to my account.
Whatever your circumstances, once you can see your claim online be sure to upload claim documentation (e.g. Invoice, pc pre-arrival policy or communication as to expected delivery date, any documentation as to communication with merchant about order cancellation, etc). Basically this is a “merchant dispute” where the merchant failed to deliver.
Suggesting that your satisfaction is based on Premier Cru no longer having the ability to hurt customers is either self-delusional or insulting to anyone with only minimal insight who has read your contributions to this thread.
Not a lawyer, nor a bankruptcy specialist, but there are some nuances to the above, which I feel should be mentioned. People keep bringing up this concept that people will have to return wine (or monetary equivalent) at some point. I don’t think that’s a real risk if those were purchased in the ordinary course of business i.e money exchanged for goods or services. Especially if these are the main business line of the firm - not the sort of transaction a trustee would need to unwind. (Nor would it be desirable to for society) Where this gets murkier is if someone lent 1mm to the business, and was unable to be paid back in cash, and took 1.5mm in inventory instead. I do not think that is what normal PC customers were doing. That risk happens when a firm is insolvent, and there is a presumption of that 90 days before a filing that firms are insolvent. People keep bringing up that clawback risk, maybe because its a cool sounding word or something, but its more a problem for friends of the owners, or select trade vendors, or if assets are being quietly monetized.
When it comes to sharing whatever residual monies from the debtors estate among all the aggrieved parties equally…that may seem like a happy creditor utopia, but it isn’t reflective of real life. Some of the legal strategy amongst the whales had to be simply that there is only x $ in this business, and there is 10 x (or whatever) potential claims. Getting a judgment is one way to effectively jump the queue and get priority over all the other creditors, if their judgment can survive 90 days without a filing. I do not know if that will work here since it may turn out there is nothing left anyways, and even those assets may end up dissipated, or lost to the friction costs of administration. I’m just surprised that so few litigants didn’t take what they could get earlier. Of course it wasn’t getting what they had initially signed up for - but how many of those complaints who wanted to get full market value of their undelivered wine and were going to fight in court for a year to “get” that probably now wish they had just taken their cash cost basis out? (It appears that TSAI did that over the summer, but it seems like the others wouldn’t do that, but I’ve stopped keeping up on the actual entries) Many times in life, my own lawyers have eventually shown me that a half loaf is better than all of no loaf, and generally that trade has better negotiating skills than their clients…so why didn’t more lawsuits end up settled for whatever they could get?
I realize all the real lawyers who know this stuff cold can’t comment (wisely!) on this, but if there is anything blatantly wrong about the general concepts of what I’ve stated above, please correct me.
Finally (unrelated) there is all this talk about creeping determinism or whatever behavioral bias is trendy. I’ve read DK’s books too – as well as Mauboissins (spelling?) which are similar/good – but there are lots of other cognitive issues. One example is the recency bias, which may be more apt in this case. Here weight is placed on historical events, rather than the current situation/facts. The classic example given is turkeys believing the farmer is their friend since he delivers them grain every day, and that has been observed their entire history. But then one day he doesn’t have a bushel of grain for them, and is carrying an axe. In the fairytale, our behavior bias aware broadbreast sees the situation has changed and flaps off, barely clearing the electrified fence, and gets pardoned at the White House.
Or maybe the bias is the window-washer effect, where the folks who clean the windows on high rise buildings eventually lose all fear of heights, since they grow accustomed to it, but they of course die just the same as anyone else when they make a mistake with their rigging. That may describe a dangerous situation, that people have grown accustomed to, and blase about, over time. But its not any less dangerous just because people have grown tolerant of it.
Let’s be clear. Paul’s information and warnings were 100% worthless, also 100% because of the way he presented the evidence. Let’s start with a point. Let’s imagine God came down and whispered in your ear that the stock market was going to crash on Thursday Jan 7th, 2015. Now let’s say you decided to warn people on this board by screaming “The stock market is going to crash tomorrow. I know this for sure. I have proof. But I can’t show you anything because my source is a secret”. How would that go? Could you communicate your very accurate information on in a way that people could use it? No. There’s actually a really good ‘Twilight Zone’ on this topic, the guy who plays the professor on Gilligans Island goes back in time to save Lincoln from assassination. As you can imagine, no one believes him as he has no proof, and they think he’s nuts. Proof matters from either unsubstantiated or crazy sources.
So what did Paul do:
He joined the board under a fake name (yes, I know his argument, that it’s a ‘real’ name, just not his name. Funny). And began posting in the ‘voice’ of a younger woman. A great start and what a great way to build credibility when you want to be treated seriously.
He physically threatened a range of people (myself included) when he couldn’t get his way in various discussions.
And now on to the PC discussion. He screamed into his typewriter about how PC was a scam and he knew it and had evidence from multiple sources. But then refused to post that evidence based on privacy issues.
So he started as a liar and a fraud, continued as a bully, and ended by claiming not to be able to show proof.
And you think this is a way to get people to listen to you? I’d argue if you wanted to pursue a strategy to make 100% sure NO ONE would listen to you, you couldn’t have done a better job!
And none of the above has anything to do with the law of large numbers, hindsight bias, turkeys and the farmer or any other ‘trendy’ econ argument. Just common sense. When a guy starts as a liar and a bully and won’t show you data, you tend not to listen.
Big +1. I wanted to post something like this for a while, but I held back.
Other than by encouraging others to look harder at PC by creating lots of noise, Paul actually slowed the community’s thinking on the matter by tilting at windmills so blatantly that people chimmed in against him when they weren’t necessarily “for” PC. He made so many outrageous, unsubstantiated claims that I (for one) often weighed in as much in the spirit of fighting demagoguery as supporting PC. Perhaps he really knew something valuable and insider, but he refused to give any facts/evidence and insisted that we were all fools or corrupt if we didn’t take his word that he had proof that the moon landings were faked at a studio in Southern California.
Well then…let’s make him a religious prophet and hurl more stones at you. Deal?
Peter I’ll give you 20:1 that PC stops taking orders and delivering wine orders by April Fools Day 2016. I’m so confident that I’m willing to risk $20…but no more!
Peter, even if you discount Aramali Hart/Paul, or just chalk her/him up to one more data point, there were many, many other people on this Board giving specifics about PC experiences that should have given the little drummers here ever increasing concern. Pretty serious and specific accusations have been made…including from me. At some point in this thread, I mentioned that a PC manager specifically told me that wines that PC put up for sale, and that I purchased, were not in fact ever first sourced. Meaning PC was throwing low prices out there just to gather cash with no short- and perhaps no long-term interest in delivering. Maybe I’d bother them, maybe I wouldn’t kind of strategy. I also noted earlier that a personal friend of mine had $186k of outstanding and undelivered wine with PC. Some orders were over five years old. PC could not and would not deliver them, and he didn’t want to throw more money down the toilet in litigation, so he took a combination of cash and in-stock things he didn’t want with much lesser value. There were many others on the Board with similar stories. So let’s not put this all on Paul, as if he was the only one issuing a warning. And on top of that, common sense should have prevailed…the most recent prices from PC pre-arrivals weren’t available anywhere in the world. Folks with experience noted that throughout the thread. And then, the hundreds of “ships on the water,” or the “container isn’t yet full,” or a “vendor went bankrupt,” or “there’s a strike at port,” stories. It all should have cumulatively caused serious concern, even if you discount Paul. Yet the rationalizations by several continued.
He has so many friends, or “supporters” as you term them because he’s generous with his time, goodwill and friendship, not because he opens his house and cellar. He had no skin in the PC game one way or another, his activism might have been a little much for some but at the end of the day he was only trying to prevent more people from loosing money.
Or do you think that people with outstanding orders at PC are not going to loose most or all of the money they still have with PC?
When I decided I had had enough of this PC debacle I talked to him and he drove there and dealt with my arrivals and store credit then schlepped the whole order back to his cellar to keep for me while I was 2,500 miles away. He didn’t ask a thing for it and it took half a day for him to do it all.
Peter, you and Mr. Martin need to get a frigging grip. You knew where PC was headed, and you, along with a handful of others on this board, launched misinformation campaigns at the same time that you were trying to save your own asses. According to your reports on this thread, you came damn close to doing so, at least making within your economic loss comfort zone. In that regard, I am happy for you, and for all of the others who have been or will be able to salvage something out of this dog’s breakfast. On the other hand, this thread makes abundantly clear that a massive amount of smart money ignored you and the other irrationally exuberant yeasayers, and got on with doing whatever they could to get their wine and/or their money back. They will continue to do so until the bitter end, with as much help as most other posters can give them. Real-world stuff. Hard facts on what PC is saying and doing and what its creditors, dominantly credit card companies, are saying and doing (or not doing). All the fruit, however bittersweet, of a few people outing a retailer who, after many years of success at the game its owners chose to play, was falling apart.
Revisting Battaglia at this late date, and making the asinine suggestion that his behavior actually slowed the path to the truth, is beneath you (or at least, I used to think that it was) and patently false. More smokescreen to keep you from looking foolish. Too late. Embrace “foolish” and move on while you can still climb out of your own hole. You were wrong. You disseminated a bunch of speculative, hipster-economic, Pollyanna-ish crap that was wrong, and had anybody listened to it, they would be…well, Ken Birman and Bob Hudak. You ended up having to recant, but apparently your ego will not let you leave it at that. Battaglia was the spark that brought the dialogue here out of the “don’t buy…more for me” mantra of idiots and into the real world. He polarized what was a useless dialogue that had gone on for years, by pointing out that the game had changed radically, and for the worse. (He also did many or all of the things that you accused him of above. In retrospect, so what? It was his credibility at risk, not yours. People have ended up following his lead, not yours. Enough said.) He had every reason not to disclose his sources. I did not disclose mine, either, nor did virtually everyone else on this thread who had the juice. Posner and others did not disclose their sources on the other boards. It would have been inappropriate to do so. Most of the sources, who have nothing whatever to do with PC, might risk being fired for circulating proprietary information of their employers. We should not want or need to see anybody other than Fox and Ortega, the real scapegoats here, get embroiled in this disaster and take it in the shorts, so there is precious little reason for anybody to prove anything to your personal satisfaction. Forewarned is forearmed, and I believe that you were already well on notice before we heard the first peep out of Battaglia. You just assumed that it could never happen to you. You win some and you lose some.
Damn near every word that Battaglia spoke about PC ended up being true. He stands guilty of being a horse’s ass, but then again, he was up against even bigger horse’s asses who were determined to suppress the emergent inconvenient and uncomfortable truth about PC. (Let us all stipulate that he is an anti-hero, and not bother to recite any of the helpful things that he did, said and offered to do. He soiled his own nest.) PC’s doors closed BEFORE January 1, as Fox adopted the internet-only ruse in order to sell what little wine that he could lay his hands on out of the back door to fellow retailers, instead of adopting the more cumbersome and inefficient process of trying to help customers that he had mercilessly f*cked by offering them what wine was left instead of bad checks and lies. Anybody not in the trade placed a new internet-only PC order lately? Anybody seen what the internet-only PC blast e-mails look like? Buy one, get one free 2005 DRC RC? I am going to cut ol’ Battaglia a little slack here and declare that he was on the money with the January 1 date, too. We are merely waiting for the smoke to clear and PC’s creditors to put it in the tank. Fox is doing a lot of stupid and criminal stuff in the meantime, that is all. Your time might be better spent calling Steve Case and seeing if he wants to bail out PC, but my guess is that he will have a better bargaining position once PC is in the tank…
Rob. I guess you’d have to say it all comes down to your personal experience. Your experience with this guy is obviously very positive. And so your feelings towards him are positive.
For others of us, our experience with him is overwhelmingly negative. From his initial fake name and thread disruption under the fake name, to outright threats, to the PC ‘sky is falling’ without a willingness to show real information that backs it up (not an email from one guy to another, anyone can fake that).
So, what a shock, if you had a positive experience with Paul, you were more willing to believe his PC opinions. And if a negative experience, the other way around.
A shame Paul can’t understand this, continues to curse at some of us from afar, from this other wine board. You write actual facts, and you get back cursing and insults. So I guess my opinion of Paul and whatever he has to say will continue to be negative.
OK on the few basis points of your net worth (like anybody gives a shit about that at this point; I suspect that most people around here are trying to figure out how to explain to their significant others the maxed-out secret credit cards and empty storage lockers). I restore your ass to its former position, whatever that may have been. On the other hand, on this occasion, I am not only eloquent, but spot on. I will extend you the courtesy of explaining why you served up the post that you did above. My point is that it was totally wrong-headed and counterproductive, as have been a number of your posts lately. If you want or need a scapegoat, let me give you John Fox’s cell and e-mail address…no, wait, NOBODY has that kind of juice!
Bill Klapp, if I were Paul, at this point I’d threaten you and offer to fly to Italy for a duel and reveal to the world that you’re really homeless and blogging from a cardboard box using the free wifi outside a Denny’s in suburban New Jersey.
You appear to be falling into a classic trap I have seen finance guys fall into many times over the years, particularly guys who are really good at it (Dot-Com blowup was my first taste, as I sold wine to some pretty powerful folks in Princeton). When they make a bet, and they are right, it’s because they were clever, contrarian, didn’t panic and saw something in the pattern the rest of the plebes did not.
When things go wrong with a bet, it’s because of factors no one could ever have seen, anyone who got it right did so because of “creeping determinism,” and anyone who called it right can’t be trusted unless they have been right with every other portfolio move.
It’s having it both ways. In my experience, one can always find some economic theory to explain one’s singular brilliance for each success, and another economic theory to explain why failures are anyone else’s fault, if there’s any fault to be had at all.
I consider him a friend. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that when he gets a bone between his teeth he can try to chew too hard to make a point. And like many lawyers here and elsewhere he can get caught up in semantics and letter vs spirit/intent.
That said, there are people here cursing him for afar just as he does the same. Seeing the state PC is in right now, I think he might have more leeway to blow raspberries at the moment though.
His soapboxing on PC had no correlation to my eventual mistrust of PC though. It was going through CT pending deliveries on a very micro basis that caused me to realize that you can’t possibly have sold many of those rare wines at such a good price and in such a quantity and actually be able to deliver on them. Once I came to that conclusion myself and added up the amount of money outstanding (and knowing that CT is only a fraction of actual orders) that I wanted out.
![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
