“Bottom line is, here in the U.S., you are under contractual obligation to do what the corporation says or they can and will close you down.
As stated in the above article, those contracts are more complicated in Russia.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if Corporate either shuts them down or stops payments to the suppliers of those franchise owners.”
It can get interesting. For example, is the machinery used to cook their burgers imported from the West, or do they produce it themselves? If imported from the West, then does it have remote (web) control so as to be able to disable it? I could see having little ‘back doors’ in hardware like this, in the 21st century.
As to the main suppliers, they’re all obviously local, so they can be paid by the Russian management, which is very likely the case anyway, so nothing much there.
I don’t want to live in a world where a burger griddle in Russia can be disabled by Palo Alto through a back door.
“Drop the bomb, kill them all...”
Colonel Kurtz