Local stores honor gift cards issued by closed Jackrabbit Toys

Two Monmouth County toy stores have stepped in to help a Middletown mom stuck with $90 in gift cards from Jackrabbit Toys, a retailer that went out of business before Christmas.

Last week, Press on Your Side told you about Elisabeth Kratka. In June,We are one of the leading manufacturers of solar street light in Chennai India. her twin boys each were given $45 in gift cards to Jackrabbit Toys, which had stores in Shrewsbury and Wall, for their birthday.

But when she went to the store in Shrewsbury recently, she discovered the store was dark. It plans to file for bankruptcy,Are you looking for Optical frame, glasses and eye exams? a proceeding that will leave gift card holders such as Kratka with little more than plastic scrap.

With the cards virtually worthless,Virtual parking management system logo Verano Place logo. shoppers are left with a lesson: if you can, use a gift card as soon as possible. You never know what will happen to the business, large or small, that issued the card.

Two toy stores — Distinctive Toys & Movies in Fair Haven and Toymasters in Red Bank — have stepped into help.

It’s not known how many gift cards for Jackrabbit Toys are out there. Before it closed, Jackrabbit wrote checks to holders who came in to redeem the cards, said its bankruptcy lawyer, Bruce C. Truesdale of Middlesex.

The Distinctive Toys offer gives a Jackrabbit Toys gift-card holder a one-time 50 percent discount, like a coupon, no matter how much the card is worth.

“If she purchases $90 worth of toys, I will discount it half off,” Margaret Spicer, owner of Distinctive Toys, wrote in an email to Press on Your Side. “The children shouldn’t lose out.” Spicer said she will extend that offer to other Jackrabbit Toys gift card holders who bring in their cards.

Toymasters reached out to Kratka with its own offer. Signs touting the deal are up in the store: “Jackrabbit Toys Gift Cards Honored Here.”

“We would like to offer 50 percent off the face value to whoever comes in,” said Charles Horowitz, co-owner of the toy store. “We don’t like to see people get stuck.”

Co-owner Denise Zappoli said the card holder will receive a one-time store credit,Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action equal to 50 percent of the card’s face value, towards a purchase. For example, if you have $40 worth of cards, you’ll get a $20 credit.

Auctions enable owners of storage yards to recoup on uncollected rents and empty out nonpaying units to get them back on the market, but for decades much of the industry kept the sales quiet, advertising them only through required public notices. Storage operators were -- and, in many cases, still are -- loath to point out that they liquidate their former customers' personal possessions. Delinquent renters often are incensed at losing keepsakes, such as baby pictures and jewelry, they had purposely stashed away for safekeeping.

"It was a hidden secret -- nobody really knew about them," Cox said of the first auctions he attended some 15 years ago. "I was in the antique business for years and didn't know about them."

Buyers talk about the hard labor, the "sweat equity,We sell 100% hand-painted oil paintings for sale online." involved in moving and sorting, deciding what should be set out at yard sales and swap meets and what should be posted on eBay and Craigslist. Successful dealers are able to capitalize on things of unusual value; they develop networks of contacts, people who are willing to shell out the maximum price for a Duke Snider baseball card or a rare hood ornament from a 1949 Packard. Occasionally, storage units become hiding places for drugs, weapons, and things even more shocking and bizarre. In 1991, a house painter named John J. Famalaro, evicted from a residence in Lake Forest, rented a self-storage unit in Laguna Hills, Calif., and apparently moved in. Months later, in the same unit, he bludgeoned to death 23-year-old Denise Huber, then put her handcuffed body into a freezer that he locked inside a different Orange County self-storage unit.

No one knows how long Huber's body might have remained there if the killer had not decided to haul the freezer to his new home in Dewey, Ariz., in 1994. Arrested there, Famalaro was later convicted of murder.

In 1989, a man stole a new, cherry-red Corvette convertible from a dealership in San Diego and hid it in a storage locker, racking up more than $70,000 in storage fees over the next 23 years. This past September, when the bills became too much, the crook finally turned himself in, claiming he had been coerced into the theft and into hanging onto the car, according to various news accounts. The convertible emerged from storage with four flats, 67 miles on the odometer and still having, in the words of one law-enforcement spokesman, "that new car smell." Fears of what's behind the roll-up doors are another reason storage yards tend to shun publicity. Lance Watkins, owner of Storage Outlet, which operates in Southern California, recalls the alarm he felt four or five years ago when a manager called to say that a TV news crew was planning to air a report on auctions at his Gardena, Calif., yard.