The second Reckless Bricks store opened at 11 a.m. Eastern at 4047 Clark Rd in Sarasota, Florida, a week to the day after the first one opened in Tucson. At approximately 1 a.m. Eastern on Saturday the store came off BAM’s own locator. The company’s store count went from 307 to 306. Reckless Ben had posted from inside that store about two hours earlier. BAM has still not answered a single question about either store in public, but it edited its own website overnight. This page is updated through the day, and the counter below tracks who is broadcasting from the store right now.
Watch the opening liveEvery public stream from the floor, side by side, updating on its own→CONFIRMEDBAM removed the Sarasota store from its own locator at approximately 1 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 19. The store count fell from 307 to 306 and the entry for id 2003205, “Sarasota, FL,” was gone. This site holds captures of the locator page from either side of the changePRIMARY SOURCEBAM’s own franchise disclosure documents list the Sarasota outlet and its owners, Jennifer and Jonathan Martin, in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions of Exhibit F, and it does not appear in the 2026 Exhibit G, the list of outlets that left the systemCONFIRMEDthe store is one of the eight BAM cut off from its Slack in August, reported here on August 26UNRESOLVEDwhether BAM has taken any step beyond the locator. It has said nothing in public about this store, as it said nothing about the first one
The Martins wrote a message explaining the decision. This site obtained it and reproduces it below exactly as written, in full, with nothing cut, summarised or rearranged. The argument in it is the one BAM has never answered in public: that a store can work as hard as it knows how, ask the franchisor for help, and still never reach the point of breaking even. It also sets out, in the owner’s own words, what being cut out of the company’s Slack did to the relationship, and what the months of abuse did to her staff.
I want to explain why Jon and I made the decision to flip our store from BAM into an independent toy store, because I know from the outside it probably looked fast.
It wasn’t.
This was not a decision made on a whim, out of anger, or because we wanted to make some dramatic statement. The reality is much less exciting and much more difficult:
For almost three years, we tried everything we could think of to make this store financially stable. We changed things, tried new ideas, worked ridiculous hours, reached out to corporate for help, and had countless conversations with other store owners. There were times we were paying our expenses out of our own pockets.
No matter how hard we worked or what we changed, we could never get the business consistently stable enough to break even. Eventually, we had to stop asking ourselves how much longer we wanted to keep trying and start asking how much longer we could afford to.
At the same time, there was another piece of this that became impossible for Jon and me to ignore.
We developed a serious moral issue with continuing to be associated with this brand. We struggled with what we personally experienced as a lack of empathy, professionalism and respect for franchisees, along with decisions and behavior that increasingly did not align with our own values. At some point, we had to decide what we were willing to attach our name to simply because we signed a contract years earlier.
And then there was my own relationship with corporate.
I am banned from one of the primary communication channels within the system, and since that happened, I have experienced little to no meaningful effort to communicate with me, repair the relationship, or make me feel as though I was still a franchisee they actually wanted in the system.
Instead, I increasingly felt like I wasn’t someone they wanted to work with. I felt like I was a problem they wanted to deal with and eventually dispose of. Whether or not that was the intention, that was the message their actions communicated to me.
It’s difficult to keep investing your money, energy and future into a relationship when you no longer believe the other side has much interest in having a relationship with you.
Then there was the human cost.
My team and I are exhausted. Not normal “running a business is hard” exhausted. Emotionally and mentally exhausted from months of hostility and hatred on social media, emails and phone calls. There are only so many times a person can be told to kill themselves, be publicly personally attacked, or open their phone wondering what fresh round of hatred is waiting for them before it starts taking a toll.
None of us signed up for that.
And eventually I realized something else that bothered me deeply: I felt like corporate. I was asking my team to continue enduring something they didn’t create, couldn’t control, and weren’t responsible for fixing. They didn’t sign up to become collateral damage for decisions being made somewhere else. I couldn’t criticize a lack of empathy from corporate while turning around and asking my own team to just keep taking it. That wasn’t the kind of owner or person I wanted to be.
So when we made this decision, we didn’t just flip a sign and hope for the best.
Long before anyone publicly knew what we were doing, we were working behind the scenes. We spoke with attorneys, our landlord and other business professionals. We evaluated our obligations, finances, risks and options. We tried to understand what would happen if we stayed and what could happen if we left. What looked sudden from the outside was anything but sudden on the inside.
Ultimately, we reached a point where staying wasn’t the “safe” option anymore.
Staying meant continuing to put personal money into a business that wasn’t breaking even, continuing to operate under a brand we no longer felt comfortable representing, and continuing to ask ourselves and our team to emotionally absorb something that had already taken far too much from us.
Leaving carries risk too. We know that. But we decided we would rather take a calculated risk on ourselves than slowly run out of money waiting for circumstances outside of our control to improve.
And I also want to acknowledge something that has mattered tremendously during this transition. Ben and his friends have been genuinely supportive. They’ve offered help, answered questions, shared their opinions and shown up when we’ve needed them.
It hasn’t felt performative. It hasn’t felt like a PR stunt. It has simply felt like people seeing a small business going through something difficult and saying, How can we help?
That has meant more to us than they probably realize.
I am not telling another owner to do what we did. Your contracts, leases, finances, markets and personal circumstances are your own. Please talk to your own attorneys and business professionals before making decisions. But I will encourage every owner to ask themselves something we eventually had to ask ourselves:
What are you waiting for, how long can you afford to wait for it, and what will be left of your business when you finally get there?
For us, time had run out. We didn’t walk away from our business.
We made the decision we believed gave it the best chance of surviving.
The store trades as Cosmic Critter Toys at cosmiccrittertoys.com, which bills it as a partner of Reckless Bricks and as “Sarasota’s independent toy store.” The domain was registered on August 16, 2026, through Porkbun. That is four weeks before the first Reckless Bricks store opened in Tucson on September 12, and it puts the Sarasota plan in motion well before the week in which the Tucson store ran into trouble.
Set that beside how Reckless Ben described the sequence from inside the store on Friday night. He presented the second store as an answer to the first one being threatened: BAM was trying to shut Tucson down, “which is why I found another Bricks and Minifigs.” The domain says otherwise about the timing. Whatever was decided last week, the name was bought in August, before the Tucson store had opened its doors and before there was anything in Tucson to respond to. The urgency is real. The discovery was not sudden.
Put the clock against the record. This company has not answered a question about the Tucson store in the week since it opened, did not answer the account its own franchise business coach gave of closing it down, and has said nothing at all about Sarasota. What it did do, inside two hours of an Instagram story, on a Friday night, was edit its own website.
There is a second gap worth naming. BAM’s most recent franchise disclosure still counts this store as part of the system: the Martins appear in the 2026 Exhibit F, and the store is absent from Exhibit G, the list of outlets that closed, transferred or were terminated. So on the paperwork BAM shows prospective buyers, Sarasota is a going franchise. On the website BAM shows customers, it no longer exists. Both documents are BAM’s.
What the franchise agreement gives BAM on an exit is de-identification, not silence. Section 15.C requires a departing store to strip the marks, the trade dress and the signage, and Section 15.D lets BAM buy the assets if it chooses. Neither provision reaches an owner’s ability to say why she left.
In August this site reported that BAM had quietly cut eight of its stores out of the Slack workspace it runs for franchisees. The Sarasota store was one of them. The eight had joined an independent franchisee association, and BAM had told owners in writing that the association could not be promoted, organized for, recruited for or discussed in company channels. BAM’s own operations manual names Slack an approved way to reach Corporate, and makes a failure to communicate a ground for termination. A store cut out of that channel is being held to a standard on a line the franchisor closed. The eight stores, and what BAM told owners about the association.
Sources. BAM’s own store locator, with page captures held from either side of the change. BAM’s franchise disclosure documents, Exhibit F for 2024, 2025 and 2026 and Exhibit G for 2026. Public WHOIS for cosmiccrittertoys.com and the store’s own website. The owners’ message was obtained by this site and is reproduced in full and verbatim; it is their statement, not a summary of it, and this site did not alter a word. The creators’ own public streams and stories, named above. On the Slack shutout: the eight stores BAM cut off. On the first store: the opening, what BAM told its owners, the delisting, four days of nothing, the store, still stocked, and the coach and the landlord’s office. On the opening: Reckless Ben is opening the second store. BAM did not respond before publication. Nothing here establishes that BAM acted unlawfully, and the disputes between the company and its franchisees remain unproven allegations. This site’s right of reply is open to everyone named here.