PRIMARY SOURCEthe company’s own operations manual
This is the plain-language version of the cited update, written to be read out loud. The pages it describes are posted at bamopsmanual.com, the disclosure book is a public government filing, and the help desk is open to anyone. Nothing here is a court ruling, and everyone named is presumed to have acted lawfully.
Every Bricks & Minifigs owner has to end every email with one sentence: that they independently own and operate their store. The company wrote that sentence and put it in the manual as a rule. Read the rest of the same chapter and you find out how independent that owner really is.
A company selling franchises talks two ways. One is the pitch, the glossy book you read while you are deciding. The other is the manual you only see after you have signed and have to obey it. The pitch is trying to sell you. The manual is not. So when the two say different things about the same subject, the manual is the one that tells you how the place really works. That is just common sense: what someone admits when they are not selling counts for more than what they say when they are.
The company treats the two the same way, and that tells you which one it thinks is the real one. The sales book is filed and public. The manual is different. Its own words say it is “confidential,” it is only lent to you, it cannot be shown to your own employees, sharing it breaks a confidentiality contract, and breaking any rule in it breaks your franchise agreement. Nobody guards their marketing like that.
So: you must sign every email “I independently own and operate this store,” in the company’s words. That same section also gives you your email address, and tells you flat out that you have “no expectation of privacy” in it and that the company is “authorized to access and search” it. An independent owner, using an address the company handed you, in an inbox the company can read, signing off every time with a line the company wrote for you.
The manual names the only four ways you may contact the company, and warns that if you go quiet too long it can count as “abandonment” and cost you the franchise. On the group chat where owners talk to each other, a new owner “may only observe.” Once you are open, you still may not use it to “discuss franchise wide policy,” and those posts “will be removed.” The manual says the quiet part out loud: you are not forbidden from raising concerns, you just have to “direct it to flow upwards.” Take it to head office, privately, one owner at a time. Whether the owners ever get to talk about the rules together, in the open, is the company’s call.
Here is the part that answers itself. The company calls this manual confidential and only lends it out. The same company runs a help desk full of its operating instructions that needs no password, keeps a database of all its stores that anyone can reach, and filed a document in court where it blacked out a name but left the words readable underneath, and the name turned out to be its own chief technology officer. A company whose help desk, store list, and court filing all turned out to be readable by anyone is not a company you can assume kept anything locked up. Whether this manual itself is sitting somewhere open, nobody has established. On this record, it is not a silly question.
None of these rules is against the law, and a company is allowed to run its own group chat and set standards. The point is smaller and it is all in the company’s own words: the manual that makes every owner call themselves independent is the same manual that tells them how much they are not.
This is a plain-language retelling. The exact quotes, the sections, and the links to the pages are in the full update. Nothing here is a finding of law.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam