OpTree

Well it was another crazy week with more unanswered questions related to Weekenders going out of business. While more and more distributors have begun selling their wares on eBay and Craigslist to recoup some money, still no word from the Direct Selling Association as to what happened or any insight.

There was a bunch of philanthropic news this week. mark announced a new campaign with spokesperson Lauren Conrad and Neways donated over 10,000 bottles of water for the Utah Summer Games.

In financial news, supplement company Nutrilite announced that they crossed the $3B sales mark which is truly amazing and the S&P began a review of Tupperware’s stock based on its new rating but Mad Money’s Jim Cramer think the stock is a buy at this point.

USANA continues to confuse us. After getting rebuffed on their offer to take the company private by a special committee who said the offer was too low, Dr. Myron Wentz (the company’s chairman) decided to reaffirm the offer at the same price!! Makes no sense at all and all Wentz seems to be doing is driving up the value and making his bid seem less and less practical. It doesnt’ help that shareholders are starting to sue the company because of the low ball offer that he is proposing. This story is far from over.

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Ok, here is what we have been able to find out thus far since we first broke the news of Weekenders allegedly going out of business. Weekenders does NOT seem to have filed for bankruptcy protection, yet - at least not in the US (which they would be required to do since they have a business license in the US). All searches of public records have produced nothing. However, since the company is actually registered as a Canadian company based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, we have been unable to search any public records there because they dont publish them online.

We also reached out to the Direct Selling Association (which Weekenders is/was a member of). The organization has not gotten back to us as of this update. It is a bit unusual that the DSA doesnt have a single mention on their website about one of their members allegedly going out of business and no information for distributors yet the headline of “In the News” is a 72 year old lady winning her 15th Pink Cadillac - seems pretty frustrating given the Associations mantra of “ethics, trust, confidence”.

We have called the Weekenders Corp office here in the US and Canada several times and just get a busy signal - the phone number we have is 905-886-5995. There is also another number of 847-478-0077 which doesnt seem to work either. Also, we were able to pull up an administrative contact named Shaun Langley who seems to use an email address of davidd@weekenders.com

The Canadian Weekenders website is down but US, UK and others are still live and still pitching the opportunity in their “Message“.

You can see the article that broke the news here. We will continue to provide more information as we get it.

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So there is a lot of chatter about Weekenders going out of business and filing for bankruptcy by shutting its doors with little to no notice given to any of its distributors. Well now it seems that distributors are starting to flood eBay with products to try and recoup some of their investment since it seems the company has been impossible to reach. As of this posting, there were over 140 items listed for sale.

The company, which appears to have been experiencing some rough financial times for a while now, apparently was in default of a loan they had taken out to an international bank (we are trying to find out which bank). It seems that when the note came due and Weekenders couldn’t pay, they were forced to file bankruptcy protection.

The move by some of the distributors to use eBay to recoup some costs is a great idea and one that I am sure we will see more and more of this in the coming weeks.

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