If you do any searching on the Internet about how Crumbl Cookies treats their employees most of the results are very poor. In fact, we did some “on the ground” research recently and numerous high school and college students said they would never work for Crumbl Cookies because the company treats the employees so poorly. We even told college students we would pay them as much as $70k a year and they still had no interest in Crumbl Cookies as they would rather be a server or do something else. Why is this the case?
It is important to remember that Crumbl Cookies is a franchise business. This means franchise owners are left to do whatever it takes to make money. Crumbl Cookies has been known for having very big grand openings in which there are lines of hundreds of people. The company is only five years old and there is not sales data for many of the territories in which they are starting to open stores. This means they are going to overestimate sales just to cover their brand. If Crumbl Cookies thinks a store could sell 5000 cookies during a Grand Opening weekend it would benefit them to tell the franchise owner to schedule labor hours and order inventory for 10,000 cookies.
If that particular location only sells 2500 cookies during their Grand Opening weekend, it is on the franchise owner to quickly pivot and try to get back in the black after a lower than expected sales weekend during the Grand Opening. If a franchise owner does not have a lot of business experience they are going to try to immediately recoup their losses and the quickest way to do that is to cut hours or get rid of employees quickly.
Let’s say a Crumbl Cookies store hire 50 employees to cover the labor hours to sell 10,000 cookies. Now the store has to reduce all those labor hours as sales are going to be even less than the 2500 cookies that were cold during the opening weekend. Anyone that has owned a business knows to slowly reduce labor costs but some franchise owners do not know how to swallow the pill so they remove employees from the schedule or simply tell them to go home as soon as they come in. This is not the way to run a business but franchise owners cannot continue to bleed cash after losing tens of thousands of dollars during the opening weekend.
Fast forward a month and maybe sales pick up. Well, the franchise owner has already burned the bridge with a number of employees by taking them off the schedule or telling them to go home. Now that their labor hours are needed, they likely have no interest in working. This means the employees that did stick around are now asked to do twice as much in very stressful environments. This has been a rinse and repeat process for many Crumbl stores throughout the United States. Sadly, a poor business owner that is trying to run a Crumbl store can tarnish the brand because they do not understand that it takes years of sales data to truly get an understanding of how the store is going to run during peaks and valleys.
If you are considering working for a Crumbl Cookies store you may want to sit down with the franchise owner and ask them about their opening weekend. If they have only negative things to say about the opening weekend, it is likely the case this is not the type of Crumbl Cookies store you want to work at. On the flip side, if you sit down with the franchise owner and they only speak great things about the opening weekend and the support they get from Crumbl Cookies, you are going to find the job to be much more enjoyable.
Remember, Crumbl Cookies is a bakery. It is not a dentist’s office or law firm. This is a very fast growing company that is going through growing pains with franchise owners that may or may not be savvy business owners. You should be able to quickly recognize if a franchise owner is business savvy or not.
What is very interesting is the popularity of Crumbl Cookies. It is on par with Lululemon, Chick-Fil-A and Starbucks right now. The only way they are going to protect that brand popularity is to weed out the bad franchise owners and allow the good ones to succeed. That seems to be what they are doing in late 2022 and into early 2023.