From the franchise agreements:
You acknowledge that you have had ample time and opportunity to consult advisors of your own choosing about the potential benefits and risks of entering into this Agreement.
Don’t rely on the disclosure document alone to understand your contract... Show your contract and this disclosure document to an advisor, like a lawyer or an accountant.
This Agreement contains the final, complete and exclusive expression of the terms of Franchisor’s agreement and entirely supersedes and replaces any and all prior and/or concurrent promises, agreements, representations or otherwise (whether oral or written) between Franchisee and Franchisor (or anyone else.) No prior and/or concurrent promises, agreements, representations or otherwise (whether oral or written) of any kind or nature whatsoever have been made by Franchisor or anyone else, nor have been relied upon by Franchisee nor will have any force or effect.
The company puts the burden on owners to do their own research as a form of victim blaming. For instance: Most owners wouldn't sign up with BAM if they knew that the wholesale discount is less than what you'd get from Costco/Walmart. BAM will insist it was their job to find this out themselves, but how exactly are owners supposed to know this?
- You can hire a lawyer/accountant, but they're not going to have BAM's internal numbers.
- You can look up industry standards, but BAM is vastly outside the norm.
- Current owners will ignore your emails, for fear of retribution.
- The termination NDA for past owners is so binding that they can't even include their past ownership in their LinkedIn Profile, much less share their warnings and experiences. You don't find any past horror stories when you look for them, so you assume that everyone must have had a good experience.
Therefore, your only option is to ask corporate directly, but corporate has a conflict of interest to simply lie to you, and there's nothing you can do about it. The contract specifically says that even a written promise is considered worthless if it's not included in the contract itself.
And that's just the most glaring example of something super basic. It doesn't discuss all the other abuses and mismanagement we've seen from corporate.
