Wendy Williams was manifesting her future. After years of moving around, the Army veteran and registered nurse had settled in a small town in the Florida Panhandle.
“I found my forever home,” she said. “I painted it Euphoric Lilac.”
Ms. Williams had a good job as a sales representative for a medical device company, but wanted to be her own boss. Her dream of financial independence began where it has for countless Americans: an online search for a restaurant franchise to buy.
She was drawn to the patriotic, family-centered brand story of Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, the world’s largest barbecue chain, with some 300 locations. In 2018, she signed a contract to open two locations and attended Barbecue University, the company’s training program in Dallas.
“I got a 25 percent discount for being a veteran,” she said. “I felt so proud.”
Ms. Williams remained upbeat even after the startup costs for the restaurants she opened in Florida turned out to be more than twice the $250,000 she said Dickey’s sales representatives told her she’d need. Revenues also fell short of projections provided by the company, she said.
“I used my retirement,” she said. “I used my house, I used my rental house, I used my van, my Tahoe — I used it all as collateral.” Ms. Williams claimed more than $1.5 million in losses in her Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 2023; the bank foreclosed on her forever home last fall.
“I believed in Dickey’s,” she said. “I was lied to.”
Ms. Williams is one of 37 current and former Dickey’s franchisees who told The New York Times that they were enticed to purchase franchises based on misleading financial information provided by the company, often putting them under water on their restaurants before they even opened.
Their stories mirror similar accounts from people alleging misrepresentations and deception going back more than a decade, surfaced in complaints and comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission, in lawsuits and in news articles.
With promises of profit and growth, Dickey’s targeted would-be small business owners, including immigrants and — despite the company’s patriotic brand story — military veterans. It routinely sold franchises to people who had no restaurant experience and lacked the funds to weather losses.
Each of those 37 people, including those who have filed lawsuits, said they experienced life-altering economic hardship after partnering with Dickey’s. Several even lost their homes.
“Far too many of our fellow franchisees have lost everything they had,” an association of Dickey’s owners wrote in 2023 public comments to the trade commission.
The owners’ economic woes were compounded, they told the commission, by corporate requirements that prevented them from earning a profit, including a bewildering array of fees and paying above-market rates to vendors affiliated with the parent company. Owners also claimed that corporate managers pressured them to keep money-losing restaurants open and harassed them for speaking publicly against the company.
Dickey’s denied the allegations in written responses to questions from The Times, in which it described the owners who criticized the company as part of “a group that is intent on the destruction of Dickey’s system including its franchisees.”
“The vast majority of our owner-operators are successful and profitable,” Laura R. Dickey, chief executive of Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, said in an interview. She said that while she empathized with owners who’ve lost money, “their feelings are not facts.”
Ms. Dickey referred The Times to owners who she said were satisfied.
One of them, Robert Dyer, said, “I love it,” of the Dickey’s he opened in Arizona in 2020 after retiring from the Army. Another expressed satisfaction with the business but acknowledged that opening costs had far exceeded estimates.
Rachel Bruckwicki, who in 2023 bought a Dickey’s in Fayetteville, Ga., with her husband, Jeffrey, had a very different experience. “We thought this would be a great opportunity to have something for our children,” she said.
The couple said they fell so far into debt that they closed the restaurant after only 10 months, sold their home and moved in with his parents in Michigan.
“We might as well have just burned dollar bills,” Ms. Bruckwicki said.
Franchisees as Fuel
The first Dickey’s was opened in Dallas in 1941 by Travis Dickey, a World War I veteran and his wife, Miss Ollie, with a menu that included brisket, pit hams and bottled milk. The family business grew into a small local chain after Mr. Dickey’s death in 1967, when his sons, Roland and T.D., took over the business.
Roland Dickey Jr., a grandson of the founder who is married to Ms. Dickey, became the company’s president in 2006 and, 10 years later, chief executive of the restaurant’s parent company, Dickey’s Capital Group. He took advantage of the rising enthusiasm for Texas-style barbecue to expand the company from 20 to more than 550 locations, according to the company’s website, making Dickey’s the world’s largest barbecue chain and one of the fastest growing restaurant franchises.
“World domination, one store at a time,” is how Mr. Dickey summed up the company’s ambitions in a 2010 interview with D Magazine.
Dickey’s growth was fueled by partnering with owners who often had little to no restaurant experience but were attracted to the promise of a high return for purportedly low start-up costs.
Franchisees told The Times that Dickey’s sales representatives have also aggressively sold failing locations to new owners, often multiple times. The tactic, they said, reduces the number of closings reported in public filings, and enables fees to continue flowing to the parent company.
“There aren’t that many what I would call bad actors in the franchise industry that have been in business for so long with as many units as Dickey’s has, and under the same ownership,” said Keith Miller, a Subway owner and franchisee advocate who has testified about Dickey’s before a Senate committee. “I’m still shocked that they continue to sell franchises without changing their playbook.”
In marketing and outreach to prospective buyers, Dickey’s emphasizes its family ownership — the original Dickey’s is still open — and its founder’s military service. And the company’s charity, currently led by Maurine Dickey, Mr. Dickey’s mother and a former Dallas County commissioner, focuses on law enforcement, firefighters and other first responders.
While working in Afghanistan as a military contractor, Tracy Norris recalled seeing a Dickey’s advertisement in Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for service members where the company offered discounts to veterans.
“It really stuck out because I knew they were a Texas company,” said Mr. Norris, a native Texan and Marine veteran.
A Dickey’s sales representative showed spreadsheets to Mr. Norris and his wife during a meeting while they were at home on leave in 2012. “He told me it was proprietary information, but he was going to show it to us anyway,” Mr. Norris recalled. “It all seemed pretty cut and dry, as long as you follow their program.”
The program included buying supplies and hiring vendors approved by Dickey’s, Mr. Norris said — but they were considerably more expensive than competitors, a complaint owners have also made to the F.T.C.
“I was like an open checkbook, and they just did what they wanted,” he said.
The Norrises’ net worth was $301,000, according to the financial statement they provided to Dickey’s, which was viewed by The Times. Most of that, Mr. Norris said, went toward fees to Dickey’s and other vendors before the restaurant opened in Sanger, Texas, in 2014.
It closed 18 months later. They lost everything, including their home. “My wife and I ended up living in a friend of ours’ garage,” Mr. Norris said. “I would rather Dickey’s have just told me, ‘We appreciate you asking, but you really don’t have enough money to make this work.’”
Nearly all the owners who spoke to The Times said their restaurants’ revenues did not meet expectations set during the sales process, when they said Dickey’s representatives told them how much they could expect to make once their restaurant opened.
Ms. Dickey said it is against company policy to provide revenue projections, pointing out that they aren’t even included in the disclosure documents prospective owners are required to read before buying a location.
Robert Faust, a former regional business manager for Dickey’s who left in 2019, said the company’s leadership was preoccupied with expansion, not interested in addressing the problems that come with rapid growth, and quick to blame owners when the company struggled.
“There’s no vetting process,” he said. “If you can write the check, you get the store.”
Open at All Costs
Mr. Faust is one of six former management-level corporate employees who told The Times that they left Dickey’s in part because they were uncomfortable with its business practices.
Mr. Faust said corporate managers also spoke openly about appealing to immigrants interested in a faster path to permanent resident status. “I have a lot of Patels as owners,” he recalled being told by a Dickey’s executive at a meeting in June 2019.
Harpinder Chauhan, a British citizen of Indian descent, said in an interview last year that he and his wife decided to open a Dickey’s in Florida in 2020 in part so they could qualify for green cards provided to immigrants who invest at least $800,000 in the United States.
“We’ve invested way over $800,000,” Mr. Chauhan said. “We lost it all, of course.”
When the couple’s immigration status made it difficult to qualify for loans after start-up costs ran to nearly twice as much as Dickey’s projected, Mr. Chauhan said he sold property he owned in England to raise more funds. When that still wasn’t enough, he said Dickey’s referred him to a company that helped him procure 15 credit cards to fund the business.
Mr. Chauhan went on to take over three more struggling Dickey’s locations in Florida at the encouragement of Dickey’s executives, he said. “The more units you have, the more profits there will be,” he recalled being told. “Like a fool, I listened.”
A document viewed by The Times from 2022 — when the Chauhans owned four Dickey’s locations — showed the family’s income was more than 50 percent below the poverty line, qualifying their son for free school lunch.
Mr. Chauhan told Dickey’s executives that he wanted to close the failing restaurants and that his family was down to its last $20. He said a Dickey’s executive threatened to call immigration authorities on him if he didn’t keep his restaurants open, even though he was in the country legally.
That meeting is recounted in a letter, viewed by The Times, which Mr. Chauhan’s family provided to immigration officials. “Rather than offering support, Dickey’s weaponized our vulnerability against us,” it reads.
Dickey’s denied all of Mr. Chauhan’s claims in its written responses, saying that he “bought multiple stores and then failed to operate them effectively.”
Because of his losses on the restaurants, Mr. Chauhan was unable to pay taxes, he said, and he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in February. In May, the immigration court ordered Mr. Chauhan to be deported, according to his lawyer, though he remains in custody in South Florida.
He is one of 26 franchisees who said they were pressured by Dickey’s executives to keep open locations that were losing money, pushing them further into debt.
Jason Henry said he was regularly instructed to do that very thing.
Mr. Henry took a corporate job as a Dickey’s area director in California, in part because he needed the extra money to offset the financial hit he took after the Dickey’s he opened with his brother in 2023 cost more than twice what he said the company projected. He said Dickey’s executives were merciless in their pursuit of money from owners.
“I would say, this owner is dealing with a bankruptcy,” said Mr. Henry, who said he himself filed for bankruptcy to keep from losing his house. “They’d say, ‘We don’t care.’”
Threats and Silencing
Brendan Gerrick is among 10 current and former Dickey’s franchisees who said the parent company retaliated against them for speaking out or asking tough questions of its executives. Several have made similar complaints to the F.T.C.
When Mr. Gerrick discovered a struggling Dickey’s restaurant available to purchase for $50,000 in 2019, he said he saw an opportunity to pay off the debt he’d accrued when he paid 12 times that amount to open a new location in nearby Boulder, Colo., the year before.
“I thought I could fix it up and make it work at that price,” he said. “My idea was I could have multiple stores, sell them off, pay off my loans and get away from Dickey’s.”
Learning of other struggling Dickey’s also persuaded Mr. Gerrick that company managers weren’t being honest with him.
“The thing that Dickey’s tells you is, you’re the only one who is struggling,” he said. “That’s why Dickey’s doesn’t want owners talking to each other.” (Dickey’s denied this.)
Mr. Gerrick started a private Facebook page in 2021 where owners shared stories that countered Dickey’s aura of success — many by the franchisee advocate Sean Kelly and Jonathan Maze, the editor of Restaurant Business — and bonded over their efforts to squeeze a living out of their restaurants.
Mr. Gerrick received a letter from Dickey’s lawyers in July 2023 threatening to sue him for breaching contract provisions against making disparaging statements about the company, along with printed screenshots of posts he made to the Facebook page. Franchise owners told the F.T.C. that Dickey’s made similar threats to other owners.
Dickey’s franchisees formed the Pit Owners Association in 2017 to advocate on their own behalf with the parent company. Two years later, the group released a survey, conducted by an outside research firm, that showed 58 percent of Dickey’s owners reported their restaurants were unprofitable. Some 85 percent said they would not invest in Dickey’s again.
Gwen Bassett and her husband, Rene, both military veterans, struggled to make ends meet after draining their retirement savings in 2019 to open a Dickey’s she said cost nearly $300,000 more than the company projected.
Ms. Bassett said the company ordered an audit on her Dickey’s in Napa, Calif., in 2022, shortly after she joined the Pit Owners Association. It was around the same time association members were planning to close temporarily in protest of what they perceived as the company’s refusal to respond to their complaints — a protest that was shelved, but not before Ms. Bassett posted about it to the private Facebook page.
“All of a sudden, my regional manager sends me a screen shot of that,” Ms. Bassett said. “I thought, ‘How did she get a copy of this?’ ”
“Dickey’s does not harass our franchisees,” the company wrote in response to accusations that it retaliated against association members.
The Facebook page was shut down in August of 2023 by Daniel Unsworth, a Dickey’s franchisee who had taken over its administration, after he received a letter from a Dickey’s attorney informing him that he was violating his franchise agreement.
Owners Take Action
But former franchisees continue to post about Dickey’s in a new private Facebook group, called Bbq Into Bankruptcy. It is one of the forums Mr. Unsworth has used to publicize what he says was his “nightmare experience” as a Dickey’s franchisee in Ohio.
Mr. Unsworth and Jeremy and Nicole Kolbach, former Dickey’s franchisees in Idaho, filed a lawsuit last year against Dickey’s and Luminate Bank, which provided the owners with loans backed by the Small Business Administration. The lawsuit alleges that Dickey’s provided “false information with respect to costs and revenues” and that the bank knew that information was false when they approved the loans.
Mr. Unsworth owes over $1 million on the loan he took out to open a location in 2023 that Dickey’s said would cost, according to the lawsuit, about $243,000 to $324,000, and that closed three months after opening.
“It is a mathematical improbability that so many stores are going under and that it is all solely the owners’ fault,” Mr. Unsworth said. “Dickey’s takes no responsibility. It’s how they’ve continued to do this for so many years.”
Luminate denied the lawsuit’s allegations in a court filing. In April, the court denied the bank’s motion to dismiss the case but granted Dickey’s motion to stay the lawsuit pending mediation or, if necessary, arbitration, as the company’s contracts with its franchisees require.
Mr. Unsworth recently testified in an arbitration case filed by Maria and Demetrius Gibson, former Dickey’s owners in Illinois who accused the company of providing false start-up costs and revenue projections. Last month the arbitrator disciplined Dickey’s for repeatedly failing to make officers, including Mr. Dickey, available for depositions.
The arbitrator wrote in a court filing that Dickey’s “efforts to avoid having these individuals testify was so extreme, that there is no other conclusion to reach but that their testimony under oath would have been devastating to the interests of Respondent in this case.”
Former franchisees are watching the Gibson lawsuit as a potential sign that Dickey’s could finally be held accountable.
Robert Einhorn, a franchise lawyer in Florida representing the Gibsons, said he has spoken with about 50 unhappy Dickey’s franchisees. “There are hundreds of people who have been wiped out by Dickey’s,” he said.
Chris Bruno, another of Mr. Einhorn’s clients, is seeking to reclaim the roughly $1 million he said he lost operating a Dickey’s in New Jersey that closed in 2023 after a year. Dickey’s said the claims made in Mr. Bruno’s lawsuit, as well as those in the lawsuits filed by Mr. Unsworth and the Gibsons, were “baseless.”
Mr. Bruno said he has stopped payments on his S.B.A.-backed loan to Luminate in part so he can afford to take legal action against Dickey’s.
“I’d rather go broke fighting to get back what’s mine.”
Susan Beachy contributed research.
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Brett Anderson joined the Food desk as a contributor in July 2019. He was restaurant critic and features writer at The Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, from 2000 to 2019. He has won three James Beard awards, including the Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award, and was named Eater’s Reporter of the Year in 2017 for his reporting on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.
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