“The cashiers looked at me like I was trespassing in my own city. I’m a 58-year-old woman. The girl at the register spoke to me like I was a stray dog. I will never go back. Hostile, humiliating. I left my coffee on the table and walked out. Didn’t even want it anymore.”

He kept reading. 31 reviews. 22 mentioned the same thing. Not the coffee, not the prices, not the food. The staff. The way certain customers were treated differently than others.

Words repeated across the reviews like a drumbeat: unwelcome, ignored, disrespected, embarrassed.

Harold pulled up the internal dashboard on his screen. The flagship store’s customer satisfaction score, dead last out of 40 locations. The store he built first was now the worst.

He picked up the phone and called the flagship store manager, a guy named Craig, been there 2 years, decent enough on paper.

“Craig, I’m looking at the Glassdoor numbers for your store. Walk me through what’s going on.”

Craig’s voice was calm, practiced. “Mr. Coleman, with all due respect, people leave bad reviews when they don’t get free refills. It’s noise. My team is solid. We’re hitting our sales targets.”

“Your customer sat score is dead last.”

“Sir, satisfaction surveys are subjective. We can’t control how people feel.”

Harold paused. He recognized that tone — smooth, deflective, the voice of someone who’d rehearsed the answer before the question was asked.

“I hear you, Craig,” Harold said. “Appreciate your time.”

He hung up, stared at the phone for a long time. That night Harold drove to the flagship store alone, parked across the street, engine off. It was 9:15, closing time.

Through the glass he could see two young women behind the counter. One was wiping down the espresso machine. The other was on her phone, leaning against the register.

A customer walked in, a man in work boots and a paint-stained shirt. Harold watched. The cashier on her phone didn’t look up, didn’t greet him. The man stood at the counter for nearly a full minute before anyone acknowledged he existed.

Harold gripped the steering wheel. 40 locations, thousands of employees, and the one store that was supposed to represent everything he believed in — the original, the first, the flagship — was rotting from the inside.

He pulled out his phone and opened the employee schedule for the flagship. 14 names. Two kept appearing on every high-traffic shift: Tiffany Grant and Jenna Moore.

A third name caught his eye, Emma Sullivan. She was only scheduled for 5:00 a.m. openings and 10:00 p.m. closings, the dead zones, every single week.

Harold stared at that name, then he started the car. Something was very wrong inside his own house, and he was going to find out what.