by Steven S » Fri Jul 17, 2009 5:13 pm
As a former Just Fresh employee, there were a lot of reasons why this place failed. They started out with a good product and strong potential under the original manager, a woman who had several years of management experience in the restaurant industry and truly cared about running an efficient and quality restaurant, and truly cared about the employees and customers. She actually lived in Lexington and commuted to Louisville on a daily basis. Unfortunately, a few months after the business opened, her husband, a corporate executive, was transferred to Virginia Beach, and obviously that commute wasn't quite as short as the Lexington commute, so she left, and everything went downhill from there. The owner wasn't really interested in investing any more into the business at that point to see if he could make it work, so instead he decided to continue operating it with the resources that he had, which were very poor.
At that point, the assistant manager, who was really nothing more than an hourly wage earner that only worked there because she needed to earn money, took over as the manager. She was incredibly inexperienced and really let quality slip. For example, the meats that were used on the sandwiches went from being sliced-in-the-kitchen deli meats to prepackaged Hillshire Farm lunch meats that were loaded in preservatives (and it wasn't even high quality meat). All of the "fresh baked goods" were actually frozen and merely warmed up in the oven. They made a transition to canned soups that were actually Campbell's soups. On top of that, the restaurant was always either over-staffed or under-staffed (it was never just right) and had some serious sanitary issues. A few weeks before I left, they received a 55% (obviously a C, but that is only because a C is the lowest grade the health department can give) on a health department inspection even. There were many times when the restaurant would run out of food because of poor inventory accounting, and they probably spent hundreds of dollars each week purchasing food at retail price at the ValuMarket across the street (and even that was poorly accounted for, usually they'd just pull large amounts of cash out of the safe and send an hourly employee to buy certain things, and I know of employees that would keep the change which came in the form of $20 bills). They even blew a $1000 catering order one because the manager failed to staff enough employees to prepare the order, so rather than taking action to try to get employees to come in, she called the customer just a few HOURS before the order was to be delivered to inform them that the order would NOT be coming through, obviously they weren't too happy and never ordered from Just Fresh again. Compounding matters was the fact that the new manager cared very little about the restaurant or the customers, but DID care about having frequent social outings with fellow employees and going out and essentially partying nearly every night. There were times where she would have employees take shortcuts to get everybody out early, shortcuts that would compromise the quality of food and service to anybody that came in after about 5 PM or so. She even changed the hours (eliminating breakfast so that she could stay out late, and not have to wake up early in the morning) to accommodate this.
Not longer after that, she left, and the owner, Shannon Bouchillon, took over the business, and remained "general manager" until the end. He was the attorney/investor that opened the business, and is currently involved in a lawsuit against Suzanne Somers in Fayette County regarding Suzanne's Kitchen, a business that he had invested in which never materialized. He really knew nothing at all about the restaurant industry and was more or less just a business manager. He was a busy person, and he would only come in whenever he had time (usually around lunchtime a few days a week, for an hour or so) and never really actively participated in the customer service end of the business aside from paging customers when their orders were ready. He pretty much left the assistant managers (all were making minimum wage) in charge without actually promoting any of them, all of whom were college graduates that had no long-term interest in working in the restaurant business (most of them were just working there until they found jobs in their fields, which were not even remotely related to the restaurant business). Although I did not work at the restaurant at all during this period, they made MANY poor decisions during this period, and basically set themselves up for failure.
As far as Baja Fresh, my understanding is that the closure was not a decision made by Junior Bridgeman, but rather a corporate decision that was made to get out of markets where they didn't have a large presence. Maybe it could have worked if they had a larger presence in Louisville, but having only one location in Louisville was too inefficient for the chain to keep up with.
