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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Majority Report with Sam Seder · 3700 - Sam Seder Returns! Haley Stevens Loses it; Franchise Scams w/ David Dayen · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, that should be a real violation, right?

And then you add the fact of these tying arrangements that get made, that it's not in the franchise documents, the disclosure documents, but you have to use their call center service.

You have to use their recommendation engine.

You have to use these particular – you have to use a certain amount of suppliers.

These are exclusive deals that are violations under the antitrust laws if this was any other business.

But because it's a franchise, and as Brian Kolache pointed out, these kind of –

ways in which franchising is regulated were changed in the 1970s, those things that would be illegal otherwise are not.

So there are a lot of things that you could do to bulk up this regime.

One of the biggest would be to just give individuals a private right of action to sue, because

here we go, there's an arbitration clause in all of these franchise agreements, so they can't get to court.

So there's plenty of things that you can do.

But what's fascinating to me is that even under the very meager terms of the current regulatory regime, these franchisees, and according to surveys that I've seen, apparently routinely, are violating even those meager laws.

for the next time that uh you know a democratic administration that may or may not be as sort of like sensitive to antitrust as the biden administration was i talked to alvaro bedoria who was an ftc commissioner during lena khan's tenure and he said the disclosure regime is just absolutely and totally broken and that we need to do a big update of the franchise rules uh during khan's tenure the ftc

warned franchises about these undisclosed fees and these efforts to shield people from being able to talk to the former franchisees and encourage franchisees to report abuses.

And there was a recent case, a $17 million fine settlement against Exponential Fitness, which is like a gym, a franchise of gyms.

But what I've been told is that the FTC doesn't even really collect these franchisee disclosure documents, let alone review them.

And so they're kind of reliant on people coming to them.

And even when people come to them, the first of these 54 complaints on this franchise came to the FTC eight months ago.

And they have not released any information on whether they've opened an investigation or done any work to that end.

So I think the overall sentiment is that a regime based on disclosure where you have to rely on the franchisees to do all the work for you doesn't really work very well.

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