Local franchise owners sometimes do crazy shit, after all, by and large they made their buy-in doing something completely different and are using it to buy into a turn-key operation, not one they built from the ground up, so it's entirely possible for them to do nutty stuff that would've kept a ground-up business from succeeding. However, there are two sides to every story, and you'd have to be an idiot to take a Plaintiff's side of it as the whole unvarnished truth. Not that the Left wants for credulous idiots...