TOLEDO, Ohio — On Thursday afternoon, the dining room of Toledo's last Boston Market, now closed, was empty in the middle of the day. The restaurant was a ghost town, devoid of the employees who former general manager Jeremy Dukeshire said would sometimes go almost three weeks without a paycheck.
"For the whole time I was there, we hadn't gotten paid on time," Dukeshire, who recently quit, said. "There were a lot of promises it would get better every paycheck and it would get worse and worse, and when we did get it, we were missing money."
Dukeshire claimed that at one point, the company even stopped paying for dumpster service for three or four months, creating conditions that were enough to make his employees sick.
"It got to the point that we had garbage lining the whole building, outside the building in our dumpster area, we had moldy food, spoiled food, maggots, flies, mice got into it," he said.
He claimed unfair expectations were placed upon Boston Market general managers by the corporate ownership. He said general managers had to pick up food in unrefrigerated U-Hauls in an attempt to save money on deliveries.
And, he said corporate wasn't paying rent for his restaurant on Secor Road, just south of Monroe Street, and that the Lucas County Sheriff's Office told him the restaurant owed $10,000 in rent, or else it would be shut down.
He noted Boston Markets across the country have shut down, including a stop-work order in August that temporarily shut down 27 locations in New Jersey because the state found that the restaurant chain owed over $600,000 in back wages to over 300 employees, according to the Associated Press.
The shuttering of locations is one of the latest developments in a tumultuous past few months for the company. Food supplier U.S. Foods filed a lawsuit against Boston Market, alleging the chain owes more than $11.6 million in unpaid bills. And WTOL 11 sister station KUSA reports that in May, the Colorado Department of Revenue seized the company's Golden, Colo. headquarters over unpaid back taxes and withheld wages.
Boston Market has not responded to two requests for comment from WTOL.
According to the Boston Market website, there are only three locations left in Ohio.