After consuming a lot of media around this, reading the former store owners' lawsuit filing, and discussing with a couple lawyers in my life, I think the business is in severe trouble. The decisions they make are that of a teetering company clawing to stay afloat. For example, the former owners' lawsuit says that BAM franchising let it's business registration lapse. Between that and the many many actions that indicate they don't have any lawyers in the loop at any step, I conclude that they must not be able to pay one.

Also, and I know it isn't incredibly rare, but it stuck out to me, the store was owned by corporate before it was sold to the then-manager (who is now suing corporate) for $65k, despite saying that it costs upward of $200k to start a franchise. I couldn't make the numbers make sense, personally. Why would they sell a corporate store for 1/3 of the value?

My guess is that their books are cooked to hell and back

In truth, the alleged $200k lego collection is meaningless. The real smoke is that the previous owners were strong armed out at random.

It honestly would just be franchise infighting if it werent for the fact that the ceo is explicitly running interference at every step

It seems like there is deep, deep fraud. The knee jerk reaction to run legal defense seems to me like they are hiding WAY worse

It's small if you do it once. If that becomes a pattern and you know you get away with it most of the time, it can boost revenues. Would that be a pattern, stealing $200K to a single family probably is too ambitious. If that's business as usual, I hope people will now share their stories.

Because unfortunately, as any Harry Dubois of the world soon screams off the roof naked and drunk, you can't become a massive company in the first place without theft.

Wage theft is the most common crime in the world.

It happens, eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

I encourage you to relieve yourself of your naivete. Your default stance needs to be that every company on the planet would feed you feet-first and screaming into a woodchipper if they thought they could make a dollar from it.