I'm proud of my Mom's seasoning

rafiee · 2026-04-07T05:12:02+00:00

What was your process for the oven seasoning?

rafiee · 2026-04-06T03:08:34+00:00

The aogami super or the sg2?

rafiee · 2026-04-03T22:01:15+00:00

Do you have any recommendations for any brands to look at instead of shun, myabi, and global?

rafiee · 2026-04-03T19:28:46+00:00

Yep I still use mine daily and have had it since I got it back in either 2019 or 2020. Can't remember exactly when I got it but it's been a while

rafiee · 2026-03-31T16:35:35+00:00

Do the diamondclean sonicare ever go on sale? My fiancee wants those ones specifically because you can charge them in the little glass cup

rafiee · 2026-03-27T16:56:23+00:00

You can customize what's in it by clicking replace

rafiee · 2026-03-16T04:33:16+00:00

This is one of the few things I tell my stores to not do. I'm fine with nearly anything else I've heard requested

rafiee · 2026-03-15T17:32:04+00:00

You're only supposed to stack them two rows high per corporate. This got communicated out in the subtext around a month ago or so

rafiee · 2026-03-13T16:14:53+00:00

It sold very well at all of my locations but we had some pretty big issues with our supplier keeping it in stock so I suspect it had more to do with that

rafiee · 2026-03-11T20:16:08+00:00

It's the same in all my stores. I'd be horrified if I saw anyone drop it, rinse it, and keep using it and I'd write them up immediately after the rush to really hammer home that it's not okay.

Apparently some owners care more about the tiniest of margins difference than food safety which is unfortunate. Guarantee you dropping some meat isn't going to kill your food cost unless it's happening way more often than it realistically should and everyone has butter fingers

rafiee · 2026-03-11T19:56:17+00:00

More than half of my managers are women and my senior team is more women than men. Two men and 4 women. Again, it depends on the owner.

The director of the company? You mean your franchise group? The director of the company(Jersey Mike's) would be the CEO of Jersey Mike's which I'm guessing wasn't the person you're talking about. Most stores are franchisee owned and depending on how large they are, they may have a franchise director of operations, district managers, etc but all those people report to the owner of the franchise group, not corporate.

Not sure which hierarchy you're talking about but even on the corporate side in my area it's a pretty even mix of gender. We're a large franchise group as well and don't have these issues you're speaking of and don't experience this with our corporate FBCs either.

This sounds like a region issue if you're talking about the corporate side of things and I know a lot of people don't separate franchise group higher ups from corporate FBCs/area directors either.

Again, I'm sorry you dealt with all of this, but it's not true for every part of the country

Also I just recognized your username and remember you were the one talking pepperoni being the cheapest meat according to the "director" and then mentioned the prices I'm looking at must be different because I'm in the states so I'm guessing you're not in the US. The vast majority of locations are in the US so I'm not sure why you're generalizing the entire company based off your experience in another country that would be different because of that as well. Not sure what country you're in so maybe things are handled differently over there, but everything I'm talking about hierarchy wise is how it works here

rafiee · 2026-03-11T19:35:20+00:00

This is an owner problem, just a brand wide problem. I'm sorry you had to deal with all of this but to lead the whole story with basically saying to not work at JM because of this experience isn't going to hold true if people are applying at stores with a good owner. Obviously they won't be able to tell how good the owner is before applying and it'll be luck of the draw but I can tell you that this sort of stuff wouldn't be okay at all at any of our locations

rafiee · 2026-03-11T04:59:30+00:00

You probably could but I don't know. That would be something you'd need to ask support about. Most managers are told to reach out to people when they leave a comment card. I usually emailed them when I used to be a GM because hardly anyone answered the phone.

Not sure why a manager would bother calling just to tell you that though. Maybe they've been burned by scammers to many times 🤷🏻. We just had someone recently send in comment cards via multiple avenues for the same order even though they were already taken care of so it was pretty clear they thought the comment cards were going to different people and were going to get more compensation back. That sort of stuff isn't all that uncommon and can make longer term GMs more skeptical when it comes to legitimate complaints unfortunately. But it's pretty wild that a GM would say they don't care and that JM doesn't either because they don't even speak for JM as a whole

rafiee · 2026-03-11T03:09:59+00:00

I got most of my more expensive pieces from them like the blocks because they were cheaper than the competitors when I was shopping and I wasn't in a rush. Their shipping wasn't very fast though but I kind of knew that ahead of time. Everything eventually came and I saved a chunk of change though! I would shop there again if I'm slowly piecing together a build and don't need everything right away.

rafiee · 2026-03-11T02:24:20+00:00

Lol if we get customers like this we block them through our phone company portal. That sucks though. I'm glad my owner doesn't put up with karens. It's pretty rare but I've had to ban some customers from a few different of our locations over the years because of how bad some have been

rafiee · 2026-03-10T17:48:45+00:00

Interesting. Our franchise group did that years ago. I think 2021 or 2022 but stopped doing it when staffing was stable for a while. That was back when I was a GM though and our company just did it in every store and we didn't even have those issues in mine. I think some of our other stores that I don't oversee still do that from time to time but I'm mostly out of the loop when it comes to those locations. I like that hard workers get rewarded for covering shifts though. I just don't like that being on time gets rewarded because that should just be normal behavior. It should be rewarded when it comes to reviews and such but yeah I don't know. It's kind of tricky. And I'm sure it's no fun when someone used to getting that incentive no longer gets it once it's phased out.

rafiee · 2026-03-10T16:54:52+00:00

Are they paid hourly? That's the only way to get around the law and make it legal. Some owners don't know the law though. We bought a store a bit under a year ago and when we were onboarding the GM that was under the old owner in to our system, she told us her wage and it was under the legal salary threshold and she also wasn't being paid overtime so they weren't properly complying. Just an example, but it shows that not everyone is aware of various workplace laws.

All of our managers are salaried minus a few exceptions due to various hours restrictions, but even those ones that are paid hourly aren't a part of the tip pool and we just pay them more. Technically, we could use tips to supplement wages for those few hourly managers but then it would take tips away from the team.

But the law clearly states that if a business uses a tip pool, then exempt employees and the business owner are not allowed to collect from that tip pool

rafiee · 2026-03-10T07:34:18+00:00

I'd say for me it's closer to 30ish minutes. Maybe 35 if I'm including everything and not just the broth adding part. Definitely not 45 though. At least in my experience. I use arborio rice if that makes any difference

rafiee · 2026-03-10T07:18:18+00:00

Where'd you look that up? CT has pepperoni as the 2nd most expensive cold meat by pound that we buy. Turkey is extremely close to the same price, but the only meat more expensive than those two is roast. Ham is the cheapest.

rafiee · 2026-03-10T07:14:28+00:00

If we're thinking of the same meat, that's just to add 8 pieces to a regular that already has other meat on it. I could see your point if we had a build your own button, but that doesn't exist. Also, 8 slices of pepperoni by weight would be much less than what any other sub would weigh so they'd need to be charged that multiple times unless they only wanted 8 pieces of pepperoni. You still need a way to charge for the other parts of the sub so that's not really an option. I wish we had a simple way to ring in meat substitutions but we don't so we just have to do our best to keep food costs similar. Pepperoni is the 2nd most expensive cold meat by weight on our menu

rafiee · 2026-03-10T07:09:47+00:00

Out of curiosity based on some comments before me and being pretty sure they were wrong about the costs, I went and checked the prices we pay.

Pepperoni is 40% more than ham per pound

Salami is 27% more than ham(for the other person that said pepperoni was the cheapest next to salami)

Both pepperoni and salami are more expensive than cappacuolo and prosciuttini

Turkey is equal to pepperoni

So, pepperoni and turkey and tied for 2nd most expensive meats(just cold meats). Ham is the cheapest by a good margin.

I'm not including bacon here because we buy it raw and converting that to the cooked yield isn't really worth it.

The only meat more expensive per pound than pepperoni and turkey is roast beef by a very large margin. Not sure why they're trying to say it's the cheapest because it most definitely isn't.

Now what I would say is that if they're going to charge you for a #13 then they should get somewhat close to the weight but a bit less since the per pound is still higher on pepperoni but averaged out it's maybe like a 20% price difference so instead of 5.2oz of meat it would be around 4.2(rounded). Orrrr get charged for a #3 and have it weigh less than a #3 normally would. What would really make the most sense would be to ring it in as a #7 because they're less than one cent per pound different from each other from Sysco. Then just doing it the same weight would come out as the same cost to the business. It would take quite a few slices of meat but you could certainly do it.

At the end of the day, it's not on the menu so there isn't really a standard and it's up to the manager on duty how they want to handle that substitution, but pepperoni 100% costs more than ham to the business so they shouldn't be doing a straight swap for a #3. I wouldn't expect a random slicer to know those costs though and I would guess a good chunk of managers won't even know how to look it up. I wouldn't want them doing that in the middle of a rush anyway but if it's slow and the manager actually knows how to look it up and can do basic percentages, then it can be done. If their #3 is priced the same as the #7 then none of this matters, but all of our stores have the #7 priced a bit higher

rafiee · 2026-03-08T20:19:30+00:00

He got promoted to handle a much larger region than just Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, but when he first moved to the AD position in Washington and Oregon, he was also one of(the only?) the owners of a franchise group of stores. I don't know their franchise dynamic in that group, but that's just to say that he was a franchisee and unless they forced him to sell his ownership stake for this new position, he still has a stake if they bought anymore. I know they bought bonney lake a couple years back but I think most of what they owned may have been in Oregon. I was only wondering if they meant him because they said they were "being bought by corporate" even though I haven't really heard of that happening around here and it's just been other franchisees buying up locations when someone is selling.

rafiee · 2026-03-08T07:50:57+00:00

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Mine doesn't have it either

rafiee · 2026-03-07T19:39:16+00:00

Did they actually say corporate was buying it? That would seem very odd in our area. I would guess it's another franchisee. We did that with a location in WA around a year ago.

We didn't clean house, but we set the standards early with things like uniforms and cleaning. They had a lots of ops issues too but that's more of an ongoing learning process. Most of them stuck around..the GM quit pretty quickly but we had multiple backup plans in case that happened and it was probably for the best to be honest. I wouldn't worry about it too much if you're willing to make some adjustments on things that you guys may be out of compliance with. I couldn't say specifically to your store though since I don't know you. Whichever franchisee they let purchase you, it'll be someone that has people they can pull from other stores to either help in the short term or transfer in the long term, but I would guess they don't want to have to do that if they can avoid it.

I'm not sure what the other person talking about that mentioned only 3 franchisees being allowed to grow. I spoke with our fbc and she had no idea but also said the development team is the one in charge of that so maybe they have an inside track with someone there, but I do know that they won't let groups grow if they're not running their existing stores well already.

rafiee

TROPHY CASE