Due diligence cannot prevent much greater post-sale risks

Risk assessment is a snap-shot.

Franchising favours the house (franchisor).

If you play a Game of Chance know before you begin

If you are benevolent you will never win.

— William Blake 1757 – 1827

Brace yourself like a fighter

God is the master of the forces of evil

Yahweh gave his answer from the heart of the tempest. He said:

Brace yourself like a fighter, now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.
Do you really want to reverse my judgement, and put me in the wrong to put yourself in the right?
Has your arm the strength of God’s, can your voice thunder as loud?
If so, assume your dignity, your state, robe yourself in majesty and splendour.
Let the spate of your anger flow free; humiliate the haughty at a glance!
Cast one look at the proud and bring them low, strike down the wicked where they stand.
Bury the lot of them in the ground, shut them, silent-faced, in the dungeon.
I myself will be the first to acknowledge that your own right hand can assure your triumph.
Job 40: 6-14

The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

Franchisors play the role of the false target

Identify the real protagonist, the Fixers.

And those that rent money.

The surest sign of a dying empire is when a franchisor starts  self-financing when new franchisees had traditionally used a regulated lender.

Very high dangers of private, unregulated lending (prime plus 5%). Same as loan sharking.

Your house is the real asset at risk, not some phantom idea that you have equity.

See Champions of Tyranny What will the grocers say?

[Cllctr.com]

The case for repealing disclosure laws

Any law exists because those most able to compete for it goes to the political process and wins.

This is how the Ontario franchsie law went in 2000. I was there.

Everyone’s interests were served very well, except the powerless: mom-and-pop franchise investors.

Sure a few attorneys were made multi-millionaires (continue to blackball, block and betray sincere advocates), the franchise bar has reached record numbers (God love those disclosure document revisions!) while the 2nd-worst-chumps, the false protagonists (the franchisors) got  a short-term sales bump but their reputation continues to nose dive.

On any legitimate public policy level, the Arthur Wishart Act is a complete and total failure.

But as a way to launder mom-and-pop life savings via dim-witted franchisors?

Priceless to the true champions of tyranny (the franchise bar legal elite).

The public Role of Tier 2 franchise attorneys

In my post On the Nature of Tyranny, I tried to present Northrop Frye‘s analysis of William Blake.Blake saw the fundamental struggle on earth between two opposing forces:

1. champions of tyranny (not the apparent nasties but those that profit from defending them; those that write for power; sophists) and
2. visionaries (the “enlightened ones” lol).

Franchise bar: In advanced franchising cultures, there are two archetypal fixers: one for the franchisors and ditto for franchisees.

Everyone else in the franchise bar is lower status individual, dependent on these two alpha males and the evolution of the bar’s sociology: norms, history, rewards/punishments, career advancements, access to law makers/regulators, referrals, who is “us” and who is “them”,  etc.

One role of the Tier 2 attorneys is to engage in battles on behalf of the pack when here is a threat.

Their out-of-character behavior explains a lot about a system that created, empowers and defends tyrants.

Where shame is, there is also fear.

1. People think the most fearful people in franchising are franchisees.

They are wrong.

Franchisees certainly have difficulties but theirs are simpler and easier to deal with.

2. People then would believe that franchisors are pretty heavily weighted down with shame.

Yes. They have their share but not the majority.

3. The franchise lawyers are the locus of the majority of all shame-humiliation. They are crippled by it. The greatest fear I have ever seen is in the eyes of attorneys that I know. Some so great they are speechless when I see them.

Their role is to be Champions of Tyranny as Northrop Frye pointed out in his analysis of Blake.

Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.

— John Milton 1608 – 1674

The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head

William Blake 1757-1827

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.

Forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance.

A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head
And became a Tyrant in his stead.

Did He to make the lamb, make thee?

This is a keeper from Hugh MacLeod.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

Mom-and-pop franchising is unsafe at any brand because on a pre-sale basis, an accurate measurement of  potential in-term business risk is impossible to do.

WikiFranchise.org

— William Blake

Brazen, Bull & BS litigation: Who said Tyranny enablers lack a sense of humour?

brazen adj. 1 flagrant and shameless; insolent. 2 made of brass

– Canadian Oxford Dictionary

Torture is a technology of tyranny.

The message is intended for those foolhardy enough to think of resisting a tyrant’s wishes.

It is the affect on the majority not the tiny numbers of actual victims. Torture creates a prison without bars and there are both physical and psychological types of torture.

William Blake suggests that lies and deceit:  forges fetters for the mind.

Brazen Bull was a form of torture that was popular for a few centuries that I was not aware of.

The story seems to start in Greece with an artisan called Perillos who proposed a new method of controlling the mob to Phalaris, the tyrant of Sicily. Perillos, the ambitious craftsman:

…cast a bull, made entirely of brass, hollow, with a door in the side. The condemned were shut in the bull and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until it became “yellow hot” and causing the person inside to roast to death.

So that nothing unseemly might spoil his feasting, Phalaris commanded that the bull be designed in such a way that its smoke rose in spicy clouds of incense. The head of the ox was designed with a complex system of tubes and stops so that the prisoner’s screams were converted into sounds like the bellowing of an infuriated bull. It is also said that when the bull was reopened, the scorched bones of the remains shone like jewels and were made into bracelets.

It seems Phalaris (who allegedly ate suckling infant children) liked the invention a lot but wanted to have it tested. Perillos, ever the ambitious servant, hopped right into the device and true to reputation…

… Phalaris immediately locked him in, and set the fire…

Perillos believed he would receive a reward for his invention; instead, after freeing him from the bull, Phalaris threw him from the top of a hill, killing him.

The lesson here is that anyone that invents new ways to enable tyranny, should not expect either laurels or a quiet death at a ripe old age.

It appears to have taken the lives of some martyrs, notably Saint Eustace (and family), Saint Antipas and Saint Pelagia of Tarsus in 287.

The website HowStuffWorks fleshes things out a bit:

1. the victims usually had their tongues cut out first (better audio?),
2. as things heated up, the occupant thrashed about which mimicked  a bull’s movement (visual as well as audio),
3. the improved movement and sounds gave  great amusement for the audience, while
4. distancing themselves from the brutality of the torture (reduced cognitive dissonance), and in the spirit of continuous improvement
5. the device became more sophisticated.

This form of torture was similar to being boiled alive but the without the visible fuss. A party game like Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Lawsuits are simply there to provide an illusion of remedy (pretense of remedy) which is not without entertainment value to a decaying empire’s elite.