JUNE 2025 – It’s a report with an undercurrent of today’s cultural divide – a Blue State news outfit goes after a Red State restaurant chain – but the June 3 story about Dickey’s Barbecue Pit restaurants is pretty air-tight journalism nonetheless. Dallas-based Dickey’s, said to be America’s largest BBQ restaurant chain, has a “history of deception and broken promises” to many of its franchisees, the NYT reports. It’s a well documented report, too, examining years of failures of franchisees, who, to a large extent, didn’t know what they were getting into. Some lost their life savings, and a group of unhappy franchisees is suing the parent company.
New Orleans-based restaurant reporter and one-time critic Brett Anderson interviewed dozens of current and former franchisees, and found a pattern of misrepresentations about the costs and prospects of a Dickey’s franchise. About the only criticism of the Times report, though, is that it didn’t emphasize the enormous risks of the restaurant business. Wiki even points out that Dickey’s gross revenues (About $350 million) don’t even reach an average of $1 million per restaurant. Franchisees ended up plunking down about $500,000 per franchise. Readers on the adjoining comment board, too, expressed surprise that prospective franchisees didn’t better research the investment in a restaurant venture. “You can’t just take the (franchise) salesman’s word for it,” wrote one reader.
Still, Anderson gets the backstory about Dickey’s, already years old. And with dozens of closures from a high of about 550 restaurants to fewer than 400 today, the chain has already seen its business practices catch up with it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/dining/dickeys-barbecue-pit-franchise.html