The Sandwich Makers Locked Out of the Sandwich Industry

What happened

Jimmy John's, the national sandwich chain, required virtually all of its employees — including sandwich makers and delivery drivers earning at or near minimum wage — to sign a non-compete agreement. The clause surfaced publicly when employees sued, and it stunned employment lawyers: by its terms, a worker could not take a job at any business that made a significant share of its revenue from sandwiches, within two miles of any Jimmy John's location, for two years after leaving.

For a low-wage worker in a city dense with sandwich shops, that's a near-total bar on working in their field after quitting.

The trap in the contract

The agreement failed on every axis courts use to judge a non-compete:

• No legitimate interest to protect. Sandwich makers and drivers aren't exposed to trade secrets or confidential strategy. There was nothing the restriction could legitimately guard.
• Unreasonable geography. A two-mile radius around every franchise location blankets entire metro areas.
• Unreasonable duration. Two years is a long time to keep a minimum-wage worker out of an entire industry.
• No fair exchange. Workers got no extra pay or benefit for signing — it was buried in a generic onboarding package.

As the Illinois Attorney General put it, locking low-wage workers into their jobs and barring better-paying work elsewhere gave the company no reason to raise wages.

What the regulators did

This case never needed a trial verdict — the pressure of enforcement did the work:

• In June 2016, the New York Attorney General announced an agreement under which Jimmy John's would stop including the non-compete in hiring materials and would void the agreements already signed.
• In 2016, the Illinois Attorney General filed suit seeking to void all of the forms; the company ultimately agreed to stop using them and release workers.

The result: non-compete agreements covering roughly 10,000 workers were rescinded, and the company stopped imposing them.

Why this matters for predatory contracts today

This case became a national symbol of non-compete overreach and helped drive a wave of reform. Today:

• Several states ban or sharply limit non-competes. California, North Dakota, and Oklahoma void nearly all of them; California law (SB-699/AB-1076) even lets workers sue and recover damages and attorneys' fees, and required employers to notify workers their non-competes were void.
• Many states refuse to "blue-pencil" (rewrite) an overbroad non-compete — if it's too broad, the whole thing can fall.
• Federal scrutiny continues. The FTC has pursued non-compete overreach as an unfair method of competition.

Red flags to check your own non-compete for

1. You have no access to trade secrets or key clients, yet you're restricted anyway.
2. The geography is huge or undefined ("anywhere we operate").
3. The duration is long relative to your role (a year or more for an hourly job).
4. You got nothing extra for signing — no raise, bonus, or "garden leave" pay.
5. It was slipped into a stack of onboarding forms with no chance to negotiate.

This article is general legal information, not legal advice. Non-compete enforceability is highly state-specific and changing fast. Check your state's current law and consult a licensed employment attorney before relying on any of this.