Hi all - I made a private group on Facebook for owners

I let all of my employees know about this forum. I think it's educational for them to see how a franchisor can act in case they ever think about going that route in the future. I wish I had known. I think it's also helpful for them to see all the crap that owners have to put up with from corporate. I believe it helps them to understand why I despise snap corporate so much.

Here's the problem I have with anything which requires a snap franchisee to identify themselves. It's very well known that snap's corporate culture is one of pettiness and vindictiveness. Anyone posting anything even suggesting a better way to improve the process (or anything else) would be met with a "letter of default" about anything they could find. The goal being to, at a minimum, force them to have to hire a lawyer to fight it. snap corporate will go to great lengths to try to pinpoint the franchisee and "make an example of them" (Peter Tauton's EXACT words).

There's no way of knowing that you're on the level and not working with corporate or actually part of corporate in order to flush out anyone who even proposes a better way to do anything. There are plenty of snap owners who are in the pockets of snap and allowed to work outside the rules if they help corporate. Just take a look at click 1-2-3, or whatever they're called. We tried to do something like this and they called our employees threatening to press charges against them. For what? Well, the employees didn't care, it wasn't worth it to them and they simply quit. snap is a very crooked company and extremely hostile.

For that reason you'll never get any sort of honesty about how to improve the brand, because no one feels safe speaking up about better ways because those who stick their neck out get it chopped off. It's very much centered around a communist way of thinking. I guess that's the Minnesota way.

You can speak freely, but I can pretty much guarantee that you'll find yourself the recipient of a "notice of default" for any sort of petty crap they can find.

No franchisee cliques, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. Unless you're referring to click 1-2-3 fitness, which is a personal training fitness group run by a franchisee out of their snap and going out to people's houses in the area. Funny, we're shut down for the same thing and threatened with all sorts of lawsuits by snap corporate and our employees threatened with lawsuits.

I can verify the notice of default response from corporate. We had a problem member a couple years back. She had started fights with 3 different members. Complained that we were cleaning all the time that she was at the club and asked us not to clean while she was there and flew off the handle multiple times if someone was on her machine. We made a special effort to stop cleaning whenever she came into the club. Later she complained that she never saw us cleaning. Oh, additionally, with the one member she had a fight with she called her husband, a cop, to come to the club and confront the other member outside. Needless to say when I told her I was refunding her dues for the month and cancelling her membership she went out to every social media site and blasted us. She also created other accounts, or had friends, say the same things on the social media sites. We responded with facts about everything and asked members to go out, read her reviews and leave a review of their own. They did.

The upset member also called corporate. A couple days later we received a notice of default from corporate telling us we had to remove our responses, as well as our members' responses. They were also upset that we denied someone a 30 day trial. No phone call asking what had happened or anything else, just a notice of default. We hired a lawyer, who has dealt with Snap before, and he laughed at the whole thing. It was absolutely ridiculous. We were able to have most of the reviews removed based on violations of the social sites guidelines, but several still remain.

Also, the person denied a 30 day pass was because she was a former member. She had surgery and the doctor recommended she sign up at a gym for a couple weeks to finish up her rehab. Corporate never did any vetting of the account. Her name, address, phone number, DOB and email address were exactly the same way they were in the system. Fire, ready, aim.