Tan and Tone America has closed their doors as of this morning.

However, they still did automatic withdrawals from member's accounts last week. What a scam!

http://www.tanandtoneamerica.com/

Is this the place with those incredibly annoying commercials?
Or am I thinking about another incredibly annoying tanning salon scam?

Did you go there for some skin rejuvenation?

Is this the place with those incredibly annoying commercials?
Or am I thinking about another incredibly annoying tanning salon scam?

Probably thinking of At The Beach (Get your Tan On!)

Thanks for the clarfication, Brian. "At The Beach" apparently has a Universal Annoyance Factor associated with it.
Somebody needs to create a video with Hitler in the bunker ranting about the closing of Tan and Tone.

Probably thinking of At The Beach (Get your Tan On!)


Hoyle 'Brian' Belt is a 'crook'.

So the next time somebody says, "According to Hoyle" I should view what follows with cautious suspicion?
(sort of like with the whole Tanning Boxtox Fad that is like something out of the film "Brazil")

Very classy. Whack your customers' accounts one more time, and terminate your employees via a post on the Web site.

Does this guy have an interest in that "'Christian' [Vanity] Press" outfit that was recently in The Nooz?

I don't know how At The Beach hangs on. They only offer one product and tanning has been taking quite the public beating over the last few years.

I think that a couple of other public beatings might be in order here.
That or putting the owner in the stocks down by the courthouse.
Under Nature's Own Organic Merciless Sunlamp.
(which is neither cruel nor unusual on account of it's "organic"! =)

(sorry . . . i forgot the presumption of "innocence" and/or "not guiltyness" for a moment.
and i have no standing in the matter as i wasn't personally financially fornicated by the defendant.
no, Mr. Stipe, i really don't think i would be a very good juror in this case. =)

Does this guy have an interest in that "'Christian' [Vanity] Press" outfit that was recently in The Nooz?

"I'm gonna GIT ya."

I think that this action is somehow illegal. The company owes its customers money for the services that they did not provide and we paid for like the roller table and sauna light bike and possibly other services. This sounds like a good class action suit to me.

I think that this action is somehow illegal. The company owes its customers money for the services that they did not provide and we paid for like the roller table and sauna light bike and possibly other services. This sounds like a good class action suit to me.

Good luck collecting from a bankrupt business.

This is why Clark Howard says NEVER sign up for autodeduction from your checking account - NEVER. These people are going to be real pissed when next weeks deductions are also taken out and the only person who can stop it is the owner of the bankrupt business.

http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clark-howard/personal-finance-credit/automatic-account-debits-not-good-paying-monthly-b/nFgX/


Too often, Clark talks to people who have allowed a company to automatically deduct money from their checking or savings account each month. It could be a utility company, a health club, a mortgage lender, a cable provider, a cell provider or any other business.

That business may continue to make monthly Automated Clearing House (ACH) debits from your account once your contract with them ends. Giving authorization to regularly draft an account is an open-ended arrangement, regardless of your contract.

And getting that money back can be a grueling process. The problem with ACH payments is that there are no consumer protection statutes governing what happens if you're cheated on purpose or in error.

So what's the solution? Use electronic bill pay that you set up so you can shut it down anytime you want. That's the distinction between e-bill pay and traditional ACH payments. The former you control, the latter is out of your control.

There's a larger problem here, of course: The rules on drafting accounts are set up for the benefit of business with zero consumer protections.

If you sign up with a new company, be sure they only get your credit card account. That way you can dispute any bogus zombie transactions they may try to pull down the road. Look through your bank statements and discontinue any automatic drafts that come out of your savings or checking accounts.

Is Clark "Howard"'s "REAL" last name "Kent"?

(Sorry . . . You made an excellent point. I just had to say it.
Still . . . Do you think that folks [gullible] enough to sign up for tanning will take heed?)

Still . . . Do you think that folks [gullible] enough to sign up for tanning will take heed?)

Hmmm, they are paying for something that is free right outside their door every day. No, I don't count them among the most financially astute. Now they will be broke and pasty - not a good combination.

It might make them dangerous.
(or it might not . . . =)

(So . . . Picture a Gary Larson cartoon, with two people crawling across a desert, under a merciless sun, coming across an "Oasis" consisting of a boarded-up Tanning Salon. One says to the other: "I told you it wasn't a mirage.")
[Maria Muldaur Background Music--from Columbia Record Club, on 8-Track--optional]

Bastiat - Candlestick Maker's Petition (http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html)


A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.
To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.
Open letter to the French Parliament, originally published in 1845 (Note of the Web Publisher)

Gentlemen:
You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.
We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us [1].

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, ``Yes,'' you reply, ``but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.'' Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

``But,'' you may still say, ``the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.'' Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else's would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: ``How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?'' But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is a gratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!


Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), Sophismes économiques, 1845

Wow, some of you are horrible. Lots of women paid for and exclusively used the toning services, especially older women. One woman that was usually there at the same time as me was gifted a full year as a gift from her kids a few month ago. The machines helped me stretch after an injury. What they are doing is wrong and they should address those who have paid or are on an auto draft. It's more than tanning. There needs to be more done.

Sadly, the primary resolution for many will be to simply power-walk or jog around their back yards in their swim attire chanting I feel cheated (and they were). Those who preferred to tan sans suit will hopefully make sure their neighbors are not home if they do not have high fences for privacy.

Doesn't JTF's "Pasty and Broke" sound like a law firm out of a Charles Dickens novel?
(it does to me)
I guess that in England or Canada--maybe Australia?--it will be the neighbours who may be offended by the irrational behaviour of Ripped-Off Tanning Addicts when The Tanning Bubble Bursts. In Mexico, the reaction will probably be !?WTF?! except in Spanish, with proper punctuation marks.

On the other hand, this could all signify a resurgence of the Valley Brook economy especially with the proximity of Crossroads Mall as a "power-walking" venue.

Edited to Add
(for The "Maria Muldaur???"huh???say wha'???"/Columbia House/Record Club?" formerly Tanning-Challenged):
s6lJ7NWxDws

Please be advised that cacti and camels do not actually exist in the same deserts.
"Horrible" . . . yes. But True.
(except, of course, at The Zoo . . . (somebody cue that old Paul Simon tape))

Plenty of people remember George Selby from his days of running International Fitness Centers. He pulled the same crap.

Add George Selby's Bankers to the Class Action Lawsuit . . .
(simply a suggestion . . . not a demand . . .)
They probably have "deeper pockets" than he does . . .
(like . . . especially in a place where, like there are no pockets required . . . unlike a Pool Hall or an "Indian Giver" Casino in the "negative" sense of the phrase)

Sorry . . .
Forgot to properly illustrate, in an interpretive manner, the Obscure Reference, above:
0uO5RKI-S8
If the Pale, Pastyand Broke Video isn't on Instant Play . . .
Click this instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0uO5RKI-S8

Oh! HWTJ . . . Could you go down to the next OKCouncilMeeting and put a boot up Mr. Shadid's [bee-hind] the next time he suggests cutting Zoo Funding?
Thank you. Really. and i don't mean a "mean" toby keith style boot . . . i mean a gentle, attitude-adjustment, reminder regarding what is important in the overall, crime-reducing, scheme of things. thanks in advance.

Dang, Dude (hwtj) . . . Almost fergot:
Remind Dr. Shadid that One Can Get Ones' TanOn At THE ZOO.
no beach is required.
right?

I work with a woman who had just had her bank account debited by them before they close. She said today it had been credited back to her account.

There was a story on this on Channel 5 news last night and what you can do if your CC was charged.

I work with a woman who had just had her bank account debited by them before they close. She said today it had been credited back to her account.

I am glad she got her money back but I hope she learned her lesson about giving someone direct access to her checking account.

Please be advised that cacti and camels do not actually exist in the same deserts.
"Horrible" . . . yes. But True.
(except, of course, at The Zoo . . . (somebody cue that old Paul Simon tape))

Don't forget about Hi Jolly and the U.S. army's camel corps experiment in the Arizona desert (where a plethora of cacti exist, though not as many of the iconic and stereotypical saguaro in far western Arizona, as it transitions out of the Sonoran to the Mojave desert). So if you are inclined to believe the legends, there could be a rogue band of camels still populating the same desert as succulent plants.

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM18Y_Hi_Jolly_and_the_Camel_Corps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_Jolly

And maybe the legend of a couple of rogue Tanning Salons as well . . .
(where you have to apply to get your refund from the other one =)
I'm sort of surprised that both Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell missed that.

The last time I saw a rogue camel in the Mojave, it nearly collided with a bunch of mules pulling a cart full of Borax.
I guess that the Yeti, at the business end of the reins, didn't grasp the concept of that little triangular yellow sign.

I suppose that, at the end of the day, we all need to ramp up our appreciation of the fact that none of us are Borax miners (who never once thought of the concept of a Tanning Salon) yet can still find a small measure of joy at the opportunity to support Chinese slave labor with nearly every purchase we make.

Is this a microcosm of "America's" current financial difficulties?
nah . . . all of that is very different.
nevermind. =)

Plenty of people remember George Selby from his days of running International Fitness Centers. He pulled the same crap.

I am quoting myself to correct an error. I meant Ed Shelby. I had problems with him back in the International Fitness Center days and am glad to see The Oklahoman picked up on this and are running this story today: http://newsok.com/tan-tone-america-owner-ed-shelby-linked-to-bankrupt-fitness-chain-from-the-1980s/article/3695456

Where did I come up with "George Selby"? Well, he is a very fine hematology doctor who treated my mother several times and I simply confused the names while typing the post and reaching back into my (at times flawed) memory bank. I apologize to Dr. George for the error - he's a good guy and reading through this thread again, I immediately realized the error and was horrified. Again, apologies to the good doctor.

~

How the hell does someone owe $215,000 in unpaid business taxes?



Not only does the owner owe customers, he owes the state Tax Commission more than $215,000, a commission spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Read more: http://newsok.com/tan-tone-america-owner-ed-shelby-linked-to-bankrupt-fitness-chain-from-the-1980s/article/3695456#ixzz21hO5Xvao

Generally, aren't government taxing entities the first in line for whatever resources may still be present? In other words, they get paid first, lien holders, then contractors, employees and lastly, customers??

Unfortunate for all involved and this wasn't a fly-by-night place. They had been in business for 26 years.

Generally, aren't government taxing entities the first in line for whatever resources may still be present? In other words, they get paid first, lien holders, then contractors, employees and lastly, customers??

Unfortunate for all involved and this wasn't a fly-by-night place. They had been in business for 26 years.

Sounds like he had the resources of the company well protected from such seizures. Knowing that he had a lien, I'm surprised there can't be something criminal about selling off your assets without paying your tax bill intentionally.

Sounds like he had the resources of the company well protected from such seizures. Knowing that he had a lien, I'm surprised there can't be something criminal about selling off your assets without paying your tax bill intentionally.

If I read correctly, the OTC lien was related to unpaids on the failed Int. Fitness biz from the 80's.
The LLC that owned the T&T assets is a separate entity from either T& T or the earlier failed venture.

On a related note, employees paychecks are bouncing. I'm sure it sucks to have $20 of disposable income come out of your account, but can you imagine 100% of your expected income not being there? And getting charged for the returned check on top of it?

And all of the checks you may have written based on that paycheck that bounced...all of those returned check charges along with running all over town to the businesses you wrote them, to make good on the bounced check or they threaten to turn you over to the DA for prosecution etc...

OK Attorney General files suit against Tan and Tone America


... Friday, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Tan & Tone America and some of its officers in Oklahoma County District Court, alleging that company officials engaged in deceptive and misleading practices. The AG will seek a $10,000 civil penalty and more than $45,000 in restitution to former customers.

source: Oklahoma attorney general accuses Tan & Tone of misleading Norman customers » Headlines » The Norman Transcript (http://normantranscript.com/headlines/x1996079972/Oklahoma-attorney-general-accuses-Tan-Tone-of-misleading-Norman-customers)