Jim Varagona

Yesterday I received a call from the lawyer representing our class action group against InkStop (see How It Went Down at InkStop). Someone from the Fox affiliate here in St. Louis wanted to talk to somebody in town about our story. I told him I’d be willing to do it, especially since I had been in 2 other pieces for NBC and CBS here.

Sean Conroy of KTVI gave me a call and we agreed to meet in front of my old store. Both he and his cameraman were very nice and expressed their sympathy for our situation. Conroy explained that he was eating lunch next door at the San Sai restaurant and noticed the sign that I put on our door, which was in essence, a letter to our customers apologizing for the lack of notice that we were shutting down. I can only imagine how many customers missed out on returning the substandard private label ink we sold. Anyway, I put the sign up a couple of weeks ago. The wording was mainly written by the manager of one of the Pennsylvania stores, with a few tweaks.

It reads:

To our Loyal Customers…

The Employees of InkStop would like to apologize for the misdeeds of our Corporate Management.

On October 1st, after store hours, and one day before our own payday, the Corporate Board announced through an email to us that they were closing all store effective immediately, and that they would not be paying their employees for a total of the last 3 weeks worked. They also informed us in this email that they had not paid the medical coverage for employees since August 2009, even though this money had been withdrawn from our paychecks.

Since then, most contacts with the corporate offices have since been terminated, including the 877 Information Number and all online services for both customers and employees.

Again, we the employees would like to apologize for any inconvenience this has created. For more information, or to keep up with our lawsuit against the owners of this company, please Google “InkStop.” There’s plenty out there.

The letter to the customers of InkStop in Maplewood, MO. The door also is decorated with two eviction notices for non-payment of rent.

The reporter was impressed by the grassroots effort to hold the corporate goons responsible and not walk away from this. Even though our case is pretty good, these people are dastardly and will do whatever they can to avoid paying everybody they owe money to. By staying in the eye of the media, we are letting folks know who the people are that are responsible and what they did to affect so many. Dirk Kettlewell, that means you.

I thought the piece turned out pretty good. I look a bit rough, but this was on short notice, and at least I got my point across.

Here’s the link: InkStop Stores Close With Little Notice (KTVI)