David Dayen
speaker
449 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 18 Sep
David Dayen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And now they're part of a larger conglomerate called Home Franchise Concepts, which has eight or nine brands, including maid services and dog grooming and also this remodeling thing.
And the issue is that, as you talked about with Brian Kolache, the regulatory regime for franchising is really just disclosure.
There is no real protection for a franchisee when they buy a franchise other than a piece of paper that says, here's how the business works.
And if there are violations that are at odds with that piece of paper,
then there's a case to be made.
However, what this means is that if the franchise tells you in fine print how they're going to screw you, they can screw you, right?
And frequently they do.
When I looked into this particular thing, when I talked to people, apparently 54 franchisees of this particular company
have filed complaints to the FTC about violations of that disclosure rule.
But what they're being subjected to goes far beyond a lack of disclosure.
They are being asked to give away kind of their life savings to purchase this business, and all of the promises that are made to them about how easy this business is, how it's easy to make money, how it's a turnkey operation,
None of them are true.
They end up basically paying tons of junk fees to this franchise operator, the parent company.
They're told that they're going to get better purchasing power.
This is why you hook up with a franchise, because you can get the supplies much cheaper from us than if you go independent.
Turns out that's not true.
They're paying more for these supplies and materials.
They're spending all this money on advertising funds and these marketing deals that are supposed to bring these leads to them.
I talked to one franchisee who got four leads in four years from the National Advertising Fund.
They paid $100,000 into it.
Showing 301–320 of 449 · page 16 of 23
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