Foxtrot at 2801 N. Broadway Ave. in Lake View was one of several Foxtrot stores to close Tuesday.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
Dom’s Kitchen & Market and Foxtrot are facing a class action lawsuit, a day after shuttering its stores with little advance notice to customers and staff.
The complaint, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of Illinois, said the companies violated the state and federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by failing to properly notify employees that they’d be laid off.
The Illinois WARN Act requires employers with 75 or more full-time employees to give at least 60 days notice before any mass layoff or closure. The federal WARN Act applies to companies with 100 or more employees.
Former Foxtrot employee Jamil Moore, who is the plaintiff, learned that his last day of work was on Tuesday “when he was terminated in the middle of his shift around 11:30 am,” according to the lawsuit. Moore worked at the Foxtrot’s Old Town location, 1562 N. Wells St., and joined the company in 2021.
Moore’s attorney Syed Hussain, of Chicago-based firm Haseeb Legal, said the court’s discovery process will shed light on how many employees fall under the class-action suit.
The complaint estimates 1,000 employees could be eligible to join the lawsuit, which would need to be certified by a court to move forward as a class action.
“It’s very, very fresh, but we did want to be amongst the first to get this on file,” Hussain said.
He said it could be over a year before the case heads to trial.
Outfox Hospitality, the company of Dom’s Kitchen and Foxtrot, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An abrupt closing
On Tuesday morning, Dom’s Kitchen and Foxtrot announced to customers and staff that they would be immediately closing all of their locations in Chicago and beyond.
Dom’s operated two locations in Chicago, 2730 N. Halsted St. and 1233 N. Wells St., and Foxtrot had 15 locations, with another 17 stores across Dallas and Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
The Chicago-based specialty grocers announced plans to merge last year, joining under a new company called Outfox Hospitality. At the time, the firms said the merger would help elevate the customer experience and allow for crossover services, like offering Foxtrot specialties in Dom’s stores.
It’s unclear whether Outfox or either of its brands — which expected the merger to close by the end of 2023 — are facing bankruptcy.
Some of Dom’s Kitchen and Foxtrot employees said Tuesday that they learned of the store closures the day they were announced by the company.
Rebecca Haller, who worked at Foxtrot’s Wrigley Field store, said she was in the store when she received a company email about the closure, finding out she was off the grocer’s payroll as of noon. But she said she first heard the news from co-workers.