Duerden’s Appliance files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy

BOUNTIFUL, Utah — Duerden’s Appliance and Mattress, an independent appliance and mattress store in Bountiful, Utah, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The news has left recent customers without answers about what will happen to their purchases or if they will get their money back.

How customers are affected

In July, Olivia Swalberg paid $10,000 for new appliances from Duerden’s Appliances. That order was supposed to be delivered this week.

When her mom went to shop there on Wednesday, she called Swalberg and said it looked like they’d closed up shop.

When Swalberg Googled Duerden’s telephone number, the search engine returned results indicating the store was permanently closed. The next thing she did was hop into the car with her husband to visit the store themselves. 

“I jumped out of the car, I ran up to the front doors,” Swalberg said. “There was a girl at the front door, visibly upset. She’s like, ‘I work for a big builder here, we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of appliances that should be going into homes.'”

The Swalbergs’ next stop was the Bountiful Police Department to file a report. Then, she contacted her credit card company.

“VISA was saying that if they have filed [for] bankruptcy and if they do not answer VISA’s calls within a billing cycle, they will completely credit that,” Swalberg said.

Customers like Alyson Deusson have supported them for years and are heartbroken by how they were treated in the end.

“They’ve been in this community for a long time and I think people have always prided themselves on buying local,” said Deusson.

Robynn Kirkham told KSL NewsRadio via email that her company, CK Builders, recently put over $40,000 down for appliances. She says she filed a complaint with the Utah Attorney General’s Office. 

KSL NewsRadio has reached out to Duerden’s Appliances for comment and has yet to hear back.

Explaining the bankruptcy process

“A Chapter 7 is really what we call a liquidation — it means that they’re almost certainly shutting their doors for good,” KSL Legal Analyst Greg Skordas said. 

 

He says this filing means that Duerden’s was pretty upside down — and there’s no guarantee that anyone who paid for appliances will get them now.

“A lot of times creditors are sympathetic,” Skordas said. “But they don’t have to under the law. They stand first in line with respect to the assets, and that includes not just the money, but the appliances and the stuff that’s on the floor at the store.”

Many comments on social media indicated the closing happened very quickly.

“I arrived at Duerden’s and was given a bag of all my belongings and my last paycheck,” wrote Reddit user GemStark21. “We all had to leave before opening. It was abrupt. No severance. I heard the state will seize the property but not 100% sure. It sucks. I loved working there…”

Skordas says it is common for a bankruptcy situation to move just as fast as this one did. 

“The alternative is that you prolong it and then employees start getting restless,,” said Skordas. “They might call friends and family that are purchasing things and tell them to come and get it. It’s usually better for the employer to just, once they’ve made the decision, to just tell everybody, ‘Okay, we’re closing the doors today’ and not let any sort of foolishness go on.”

What customers can do if they already paid for appliances?

“If they could get their money back, it depends on whether or not whether or not the banks can help them,” said University of Utah law professor Chris Peterson. “If they paid on a credit card, a statute called the Truth in Lending Act, allows them to reverse the charge. So, if they can’t work it out with the merchants that haven’t lived up to their obligations, they could call their credit card company and ask them to reverse the charges.”

Petersen says if that doesn’t work, there might be some help from a bankruptcy court. 

“There’s a particular legal thing called a proof of claim form,” said Peterson. “You have to figure out which bankruptcy court the company filed in and then file one of these proof of claim documents. In the end, there might be some chance that the bankruptcy judge will direct some money away.”

If you paid by check and it has already cleared, you might not be so lucky.

 

“It’s going to be tough to get that money back since they made a promise to pay,” he said. “They [may] have a breach of contract claim against the company that’s not delivered. They could sue them, even perhaps in small claims court, which is a faster and easier process, but that gets diverted into the bankruptcy court. And so, once again, they’re back to trying to deal with all the other creditors of the company and bankruptcy.”

Peterson says an attempt at getting your money back through the courts could take a lot of time, even though Chapter 7 bankruptcy tends to go faster.

“Chapter 7 bankruptcy [is where] the company just winds down sells off all of its assets and then ceases to exist,” he said. “Bankruptcy cases can be relatively simple or they can get really, really complicated. It’s the sort of thing that you need to hire a lawyer who can dig into the facts for many of these families.”

“And look it’s probably just not worth it to hire a lawyer to spend good money chasing bad,” Peterson said.

KSL NewsRadio’s Clayre Scott and Maria Shilaos contributed to this report.