Dick Smith did a pre-christmas sale offering their own Dick Smith gift cards at a discounted price. At this stage it was not public knowledge that they were about to go belly up and a lot of people who purchased large quantities of the cards to give away as Christmas gifts, or to save for a rainy day to get something later on ended up with nothing as the gift cards were the first thing to be made void by the administrators when they announced that the company would be having a closing down sale to get rid of the rest of the existing stock.
With regards to Bissett charging in advance for backorders, this was not something that they’d ever done before. Bissett’s policy was to send goods out first and then charge for them after Australia Post had informed them that they had been delivered. The staff might not have been aware of the problems going on within the company, but someone was being told all of a sudden to start taking money first instead of waiting for backorders to actually arrive from the UK. Even some new subscribers were charged immediately, and that again was not the common practice for Bissett. Someone high up was desperate to pay for expenses and decided the best way to do this was to start taking money in advance for everything. So there are some people who got burnt in the process of Bissett’s collapse. Someone knew this was going on and they were keeping their woirkers, their subscribers, and even the UK publishing companies in the dark about it all.
