“Corporate taking over is the last resort. The absolute last resort. We never do that. We don’t do that.” BAM’s own tables book eight takeovers in six years.
PRIMARY SOURCEEchoBase Network’s August 14 interview, public and quoted as aired; BAM’s own Item 20 Table 4 across its FDD editions; and this site’s prior reporting, linked throughout
32:32EchoBase Network sat down with the daughter of a former Bricks & Minifigs owner. She appears under a pseudonym, “Olivia,” because the family is afraid, and EchoBase deliberately withholds which store they had and when. We honor that: nothing in this update identifies the family, the store, or the state, and nothing here goes beyond what aired. Her mother bought a franchise, ran it for years, asked corporate for an orderly way out, and lost the store in a corporate takeover. What makes her account reportable is not that it is dramatic. It is that the checkable parts check, against BAM’s own filings, and against what this site has already documented at other stores.
Lunch with the founders’ sons
It starts at training in Utah, back when corporate was, in her words, “a little small office building thingy.” The McNeff brothers took the new franchisees to lunch. The conversation she remembers:
“They were telling us about their dad and how he like cheated on their mother with, like, you know, ladies of the night, and gambled away their money, or like stole money for them to do that kind of stuff.”
Her own caution, in the next breath: “in retrospect, I don’t know if they were just making stuff up because they were mad.” And the host’s: “we have actually heard that exact same story from other people.” The brothers’ war with their father is not news to this site; a version of it is in the court record. What is new is where she says they told it: over lunch, to strangers who had just wired them their savings. “I remember sitting there eating my food thinking, this is such a weird thing to talk to strangers about… and we’re your new employees.”
“Wait, who are you?”
The store struggled. The family says it begged corporate for help and got silence, or worse:
“Just like begging for help, basically, only to go ghosted, ignored, unanswered, or be like, ‘Wait, who are you?’… We’ve been here so, so long, you don’t even remember us.”
When her mother needed to leave the business, she says, the family did it by the book: “We gave them a year in advance. And the whole time they ignored us, forgot us, dropped the ball every step of the way, yelled at us, belittled us.” The man corporate routed them to for the exit was Darin Hicks, BAM’s Chief Development Officer, the executive whose job, on BAM’s own paper, is bringing franchisees in, and who, as this site has reported, spent three years selling two franchise systems at once. Her memory of his counseling style: “That’s what Darin screamed at me: that we can’t think about the past. We can only think about the now.” And when her mother explained she was on a deadline to move away “for personal safety reasons,” she says he answered with comments like:
“Well, it’s not like you can’t go somewhere where we can’t find you, if you’re trying to, like, abandon the store.”
“We never do that,” eight times
Through it all, she says, the family kept hearing one reassurance about corporate takeovers:
“Corporate taking over is the last resort. The absolute last resort. We never do that. We don’t do that.”
Here is “never,” as BAM’s own Item 20 Table 4, the federal disclosure table titled “Status of Company-Owned Outlets,” has booked it, edition after edition:
| Store | Year | BAM’s own category |
|---|---|---|
| Southington, Connecticut | 2020 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| Wesley Chapel, Florida | 2020 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| Vancouver, Washington | 2020 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| Billings, Montana | 2023 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| Canby, Oregon | 2023 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| San Ramon, California | 2024 | Reacquired from franchisee * |
| Lutz, Florida | 2024 | Reacquired from franchisee |
| Port Charlotte, Florida | 2025 | Reacquired from franchisee |
* The San Ramon entry is BAM’s own booking for a store whose owner became a BAM officer; the category is BAM’s, and so is the arithmetic. Every row above is from BAM’s Item 20 tables and has appeared in this site’s prior reporting.
Three of the eight came in a single year, 2020. Five more have come since 2023. The pace of “never” is not slowing.
PRIMARY SOURCEFDD Item 20 Table 4, editions 2021 through 2026. Eight reacquisitions booked across six years by the company that, in her account, told a struggling family it never does this
The locks, and the paperwork that never came
Then it happened to them. In her telling, a year of pleading ended with corporate’s message reduced to seven words:
“We changed the locks. Don’t come back.”
Asked directly whether the family changed the locks themselves: “No, they changed the locks on us.” She says the warning came to the store’s staff, not to the family: someone from corporate texted their former employee, by then working for the new corporate management, that people were coming to change the locks, “don’t let [them] in, we don’t know what they might do.” A family that had spent a year asking permission to leave, recast in a text message as a danger to its own store.
And the paper? She says corporate sent “unfair termination contracts with fees and stipulations,” that there was “no termination agreement,” and that “they ended up never sending a final copy of anything.” The family says it recovered nothing. “The whole time we were like, please, we just want to do this the right way, the fair way, the easy way. Please work with us. Please, please, please.” Her summary: “At the end of the day, instead of doing it fairly, they just locked us out, sadly.” Getting any response at all, she says, eventually took hiring a lawyer, “to even get them to respond,” and when “the little retainer on our lawyer ran out,” the silence won.
Set her missing paperwork against the filings. In BAM’s own Exhibit G departure lists, every exit lands in one of a few tidy phrases, “Transferred to New Owner,” “Mutual Termination,” “Ceased Operations.” A paperwork taxonomy, maintained by a company one family says never finished the paperwork.
ASSERTEDHer account, on camera. This site cannot verify the family’s paperwork; what it can verify is the pattern the account sits in
Because a changed lock is not new here. The November 14, 2024 repossession in Keizer, Oregon ended with the locks changed that same night, a fact sitting in the police file this site published in full. And the tidy labels are not new either: how BAM’s filings book departures, terminations rendered as transfers, takeovers that appear in one table and vanish from another, is documented row by row in our census of the company’s self-contradictions.
The quiet machine
Around the takeover, her account describes a company managing its owners’ speech. When the family compared notes with nearby stores: “corporate actually caught wind of that and was like, don’t talk to each other… They said stop talking to them.” Inside the company Slack, the same instinct ran on autopilot:
“We mostly kept our mouth shut, because we knew that it could, like, very easily accidentally cause a problem if you said the wrong thing, or reacted to the wrong thing wrongly.”
That is a franchisee describing fear of her own franchisor’s chat room, the same Slack whose #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks channel and owner conversations this site has reported from the inside. EchoBase adds two more pieces, on its own account: that store staff say corporate was briefing them on the Reckless Ben story before the public knew it, “trying to prepare them,” with owners told that if the critics “showed up asking about LEGO, to not speak to them, to not say anything.” And the host’s own arithmetic of fear: “we’ve reached out to probably in between 25 and 35 previous store owners, and literally we’ve gotten a response from three.”
ASSERTEDHer firsthand account (the gag, the Slack); EchoBase’s own statements for the pre-briefing, the do-not-speak instruction, and the outreach numbers
What she wanted you to know about the store itself
One more line from the interview belongs here, because a fair record prints it: asked about buying LEGO from the public, she says, “we always tried to be as fair as we could with the resources that we had, because we were struggling so hard,” down to declining trades the store could not afford to pay honestly for. “We had a really good relationship with our community. People loved us. We loved them.” The family this happened to was, on its own telling, exactly the kind of store the brand advertises.
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