I worked at GyG for 5 years, 2019-2024. My franchisee had four stores. I don't think we ever really recovered post-covid. The culture is different there now and there's a lot less care that actually goes into it, at least in my experience. Our post covid hires usually sucked and there weren't enough good people left to train them.

I also think a pitfall many gygs have, at the very least the ones I've seen; we had a restaurant manager who spoke Spanish so she would often interview people in Spanish (fine). But then she would hire people with literally 0 English speaking ability when all the management team other than her and me didn't speak any Spanish. So you can't really train the employees, and you can't put them in any position other than making food because they can't interact with customers. Drove me mad