Prospects were given the required Federal Trade Commission disclosure document, with the agency's disclaimer, "We haven't checked it and don't know if it's correct," displayed prominently on the first page. Inside, financial statements prepared by certified public accountant James Hurt Jr. showed a healthy little company: $355,000 in franchise sales, with a pretax profit of $34,000. If anyone asked about the lawsuits, Brothers explained them away as unfortunate growing pains, early mistakes that had been corrected.
Many prospects had their lawyers involved before they bought, but few really wanted advice. "I don't want to know what you think of the business," Tom Bolles recalls telling his lawyer before buying the central Indiana master. "Just tell me whether the papers look OK." In Cincinnati, Lynn Karp's attorney walked out of their meeting, telling his client she'd be better off starting a maid service on her own. "But I found Carol's exuberance compelling," Karp remembers, "and I wanted the security of being in a franchise."
Many prospects also called on a couple of Pop-Ins owners, "and everyone painted a rosy picture," remembers Janet Price. Later, when Price ran her own Pop-Ins and prospects would call her for an opinion, she'd understand why the reports were so good: every franchisee had a stake in Carol's selling yet another franchise. Besides, franchisees were loath to admit they'd made a bad investment, or that they weren't smart enough or determined enough to make a simple cleaning service succeed. They kept their disappointment to themselves.
Nearly everyone who bought a Pop-Ins franchise was disappointed, sooner or later. For some, disillusionment began with their first drive down Columbiana's four-block Main Street, where the grimy windows advertising appliance repair belied all dreams of glory. For others, it came during training: speed cleaning didn't seem like much more than common sense, cleaning from left to right and top to bottom. ("Actually, we weren't taught much about the actual cleaning," one franchisee remembers. "Instead, bookkeeping was stressed, making sure Pop-Ins got its piece of the action.")
Still more lost faith when they got out into the real world, and found themselves scrubbing toilet bowls, and losing money doing it. It was fine for headquarters to refer to a franchisee's employees as technicians and require that they dress in uniforms and work on commission, but actually finding people to do the work was harder than franchisees expected. Customers didn't exactly flock to Pop-Ins franchises, either, and the profit projections worked out at Pop-Ins U. proved wildly unrealistic.
Janet Price had been in the system less than two months, "cleaning my little heart out," when a telegram arrived from headquarters, congratulating her on having the highest-grossing Pop-Ins in the country. She decided then to throw in the towel. "That made me scared," she remembers. "Gross isn't net. I wasn't making a profit, and I realized I probably never would."
Price says she had felt queasy about Pop-Ins from the day she signed her contract, when headquarters had tried to pressure her to buy a second territory. Her start-up kit was useless: 10 gross of plastic trash bags, all too small to use, and a vacuum cleaner that spewed dust out the front. Missing were the lighted sign and the 10 accounting ledgers. The 800 sheets of letterhead, 300 envelopes, and 400 referral cards came without her address imprinted. As Price had been promised, Carol Brothers came to her official opening, but raised eyebrows by making a pass at the local radio personality.
Like most of the early franchisees, however, Price's most serious complaint had to do with the price and quality of the Pop-Ins supplies, none more so than Polly Pop-Ins' Carpet Cleaning Compound. Actually, Polly's brew was nothing more than a commercially available carpet cleaner that Price discovered was repackaged and marked up for Pop-Ins by Century, Don Brothers's company in Columbiana. When Price asked if she could buy the Host brand cleaner directly from the manufacturer and save some 113%, she was told she could -- but only if she went to the expense of having it tested and chemically analyzed to make sure it was up to Pop-Ins' standards.
For Price, that was enough. Her fellow franchisees might be cowed by Carol's charisma, Price decided, but she was tired of being made a fool of. "I thought they wanted me to succeed, but they wanted to bleed me dry," Price says. After several stormy sessions with Brothers, which included accusations of fraud and threats of slander suits, Price dropped out of Pop-Ins in April 1982 and put her franchise up for sale. There was no buyer.
Other franchisees were defecting as well -- some, like Price, merely discouraged, others bankrupt, like David Brethen, who went belly-up less than a year after his glowing portrait in Money magazine. The survivors did their best to hang on to their investment, but there were no more true believers. To most of them, the headquarters' staff seemed incompetent, negligent, or both, and their CEO's explanation for the relentless turnover -- one operations manager fired for taking kickbacks, the next fired for stealing -- did little to build confidence. The more courageous among them complained loudly and repeatedly, but always behind closed doors, so as not to discourage any new prospects who might be visiting.
