Applebee’s Saved My Life’: A Franchise Owner Gives Former Inmates A Second Chance
“I was like, I just come from prison, I didn’t even know what was going on,” he says He had earned his GED high-school equivalency degree and a food-handler certificate in prison, so he answered an ad on Craigslist for a job at Apple-Metro, the New York franchisee of Applebee’s. He hit it off with the general manager. The job, as a broiler cook, was the first stable one he’d ever had. “Applebee’s saved my life,” he says. Today, he’s an assistant kitchen manager at Applebee’s Fordham Road location in the Bronx, and on track for a promotion to the next level, to kitchen manager, a role that’s akin to running a mini-factory. Pulling his released inmate ID out of his wallet, he proclaims: “There is nothing that can make me want to go back to being that person.”