PRIMARY SOURCEBricks & Minifigs’ own public store websites and operations manual
Every Bricks & Minifigs store presents itself as a local, independent business. Its website says so. Look closer at that website and a different picture appears: the 252 store sites are not 252 separate websites at all. They are one website, run from a single login the store owner does not hold. You can confirm the whole of it without signing into anything. The evidence is in plain view on the company’s own public pages.
Pick any store and look at its web address. Akron’s is bricksandminifigs.com/akron-oh. Boise’s is bricksandminifigs.com/boise-id. Every one of the 252 stores is the same: a slash and a city name on the end of the company’s own domain.
That is not a small detail. An independent business owns its own address, something like akronbricks.com. A Bricks & Minifigs store does not have one. Its website is a folder inside the company’s website. All 252 of them sit on a single web address the company owns.
The folders are not just tidy naming. They are subsites of one installation. Every image on every store site is served from a path like …/uploads/sites/319/…, where the number is that store’s slot in a single network. Akron is site 319. Albuquerque is site 11. This site counted 242 stores carrying their own number, running from 4 up to 397.
This is a standard setup called a WordPress Multisite network. One piece of software runs many sites at once, and it has one owner: a single network administrator.
Here is the part that matters. By the way the software is built, that one administrator can publish to, rewrite, or switch off any site in the network, from a single dashboard, without the individual site’s owner lifting a finger. The store owner is not that administrator. The store owner is a user on a site somebody else runs.
Because it is one system, the same material shows up across the network, dressed as local. The clearest example is the staff. The same stock photograph of a smiling “team” appears on 104 of the store sites, presented at each as the people you would meet at that location. A second such photo appears on 101. A single storefront photo taken at one Oregon store is reused as generic decoration on 125 others.
The pages match too. The same set of pages exists across the network, store after store: a “BAM Family History” page on 218 of them, a “Buy, Sell, Trade” page on 189, a “Plan an Event” page on 146. The local business a customer thinks they are visiting is, on the web, a copy stamped out of one master and given a city name.
The websites are not the only channel run this way, and for the rest, we do not have to infer. The company says it in writing. Its operations manual, reported here, puts it plainly about social media: “Corporate staff will create your Facebook and Instagram accounts and assign them to your store during the onboarding process.”
The store does not open its own accounts. Corporate opens them and hands them over. The same manual routes every piece of a store’s marketing through a corporate approval inbox, down to a t-shirt or a bulk bucket.
So across the store’s whole public voice, its website, its Facebook, its Instagram, its marketing, the same pattern holds. The channel is built by the company, and the company keeps the keys.
Put the two together and the ordinary reading of “independent” does not survive. A single network login controls all 252 store websites. From it, one person can post the same thing to every store at once, edit any store’s pages, or take a store’s site down entirely. That is what a WordPress network administrator can do, by design. It is the difference between a company that helps its franchisees build websites and a company that holds the only key to all of them.
A store owner who falls out with the company does not hold the website customers use to find them, the accounts they post from, or the marketing they are allowed to run. None of it was ever theirs.
And yet every one of these stores is required, by the same company’s manual, to tell the public at the bottom of every email that it is “independently owned and operated.” All 252 of those websites sit on one address, under one login. That is where the phrase meets the architecture.
In fairness. A franchisor providing and hosting its franchisees’ websites is ordinary and lawful, and running them on one WordPress network is a common, efficient way to do it; many franchise systems work exactly this way, and it saves small owners the cost and difficulty of building and securing a site alone. Shared templates, a shared photo library, and a common page structure are normal franchise brand-consistency, not proof of wrongdoing by themselves, and the buyer of a franchise generally understands the brand controls the brand’s marketing. That corporate can technically edit or remove a store’s site is a capability of the architecture; this report does not assert the company has done so to any particular store, only that the control exists and rests with the company rather than the owner. Everything described here is visible on the company’s own public websites and in its published manual, without any login or private access; readers can check any store’s address and page source themselves. Nothing here is a finding of law. The point is narrow and it is the company’s own: the store the public is told is independent runs, on the web, on infrastructure one company builds, controls, and can switch off.
Sources. The store web addresses (all 252 in the form bricksandminifigs.com/<store>), the shared image files, and the common page set are public on the stores’ own websites, reachable without a login and reflected in each site’s public content listing; this site captured the 252 stores’ public site data on July 23, 2026 (identity, media, and page listings), from which the single-host structure, the WordPress Multisite subsite paths (…/uploads/sites/<id>/, 242 numbered subsites in the range 4–397), the reused “team” photographs (104 and 101 sites), the reused Oregon storefront photo (125 sites), and the common pages (“BAM Family History,” 218; “Buy, Sell, Trade,” 189; “Plan an Event,” 146) are counted. The description of what a WordPress Multisite network administrator can do reflects the documented, standard behavior of that software. The requirement that corporate creates and assigns each store’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, and that marketing route through a corporate approvals process, is the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual, Section 18, reported in The Operations Manual, Sections 17–18. The requirement that every store email declare the store “independently owned and operated” is reported in the Operations Manual, Sections 1–3. Related: the vendors you’re forced to use.
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