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Food

Petty Coffee Shop Owner Moves Entire Building Overnight to Spite Corporate Overlords

“We had actually been left with no other option but to organize a black ops operation."
Photo: Getty Images - Harriet Bailey / EyeEm

Like a lot of businesses, the Muzz Buzz coffee chain has an interactive map on its website, showing where Australians and New Zealanders can find one of its 50-plus drive-through kiosks. Sometime this week, the company should probably update the map to show the current location of its Darwin drive-through—assuming that Muzz Buzz can find it.

Kimdelia Cole told ABC News that she had only been a Muzz Buzz franchisee for a month when she started to sense that things weren’t going well. She said that there were a number of issues from the start, including the fact that she didn’t have a sub-lease and she felt that she wasn’t getting some of the company support that was promised in her franchise agreement.

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Cole and Muzz Buzz attempted mediation, which didn’t work. She said that she wanted to terminate her franchise agreement, but the company argues that she actually just stopped paying rent. Although Muzz Buzz leases the strip of asphalt where the shop was located, Cole actually owns the building, so over the weekend, she decided she’d just take what was hers.

“We had actually been left with no other option but to organise a black ops operation," she told ABC.

In the middle of the night, she somehow went to her Muzz Buzz cafe and physically removed the entire 13-foot-by-40-foot building from the parking lot. Where did she take it? Muzz Buzz says it doesn’t matter, because she can’t do anything with it anyway. "It's her building, but we have the trademark rights over the building and it can't be used for anything but a Muzz Buzz and she was well aware of that," Warren Reynolds, Muzz Buzz chairman, told the news outlet. “In the disclosure document it states that […] she signed off on reading the disclosure document."

Reynolds also alleges that Cole stopped paying her rent six months ago, and that he had been footing the bill for her entire caffeine-dispensing operation.

It also seems like this situation is heading to court. We secretly hope that Cole moves her whole franchise to the parking lot and sells coffee to the attorneys on their way in.