Edit 10/13/26 @ 10:30am: You can read Sean's response in the comments, linked here
Original post:
Hi there Sean Lilly Wilson (Chief Executive Optimist of Fullsteam Brewery) and hello to the Durham community who loves some local business drama,
I'm what you might call a disgruntled former employee of the original Fullsteam location on Rigsbee Avenue. I worked there for two years and worked the very last day it was open. Lots of folks worked there a lot longer than me, but I was there long enough to love that place deeply and cherish the community of co-workers that I'm lucky enough to still call my friends.
I’m writing this post for a few reasons. I've been encouraged by u/crippledgiants to invite u/fullsteambrewery (Sean Lilly Wilson, owner) to respond -- and I sincerely hope he does. I’m also someone who has less to lose from posting something like this, and the collective frustration needs an outlet, so here ya go.
The vast majority of former Rigsbee Fullsteam employees are still rightly pissed at Sean after how he handled the final year of Rigsbee's existence. Unfortunately in trying to provide a nuanced level of context, it’s lengthy. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s the goals of this post up top:
- Sean apologizes to his former and current employees -- without sugar coating it, without a positive spin, and without ChatGPT or some other AI chat bot to write the apology for him. He screwed over an entire community that worked hard for him with seemingly zero remorse (and with an upbeat attitude even?) and we are still sour about it.
- Current and future employees hold him accountable. Sean has a long history of burning people, being generally disrespectful to people under him, and being the Ideas Guy with little thought to how it affects others. Let it be known that if you experience that behavior from him, it is not new, and it won’t be the last time as long as you allow it.
- Durham community members decide if they want to still give Sean/Fullsteam their business when there are other great options out there. Notably, Fullsteam is no longer a Durham brewery -- all Fullsteam beer is now brewed in Charlotte by NoDa or by a small team in Rocky Mount.
UPFRONT CONCESSIONS AND GOOD THINGS
Fullsteam has a positive sentiment with the community for good reason. When I got hired at Fullsteam in late October 2022, I was excited by the vibrant employee community right away. These were folks who Gave A Damn about the place they worked, stuck around for longer than the hospitality/service industry norm, and cared about each other.
I think we can all appreciate Fullsteam's mission (support the Southern Beer Economy by making beer with only locally sourced ingredients and paying NC farmers) and the stated Core Values. I also knew that Fullsteam was a founding member of the Durham Living Wage Project (spoiler alert, this doesn't exist anymore, probably because it's not possible for most businesses anymore).
When I was first working at Fullsteam, Sean was in and out of the taproom but seemed nice enough, albeit a little neurotic. He cared. We had quarterly meetings. We had a nice Christmas holiday party that year and I was touched that Sean wrote everyone handwritten cards.
At some point in 2023, the construction of several condo complexes started along Rigsbee, including the one that's now Geer House and the one directly next to the old tavern location. These really fucked us over big time. People stopped coming in during the day, construction dust and noise really ruined the vibe, and we regularly had construction debris falling on our rooftop. It hurt the business and it makes sense that revenue was being lost and the changes that have to come with that. We were also told that the building owner was also going to increase the rent 3x or maybe sell the building, so there was confusion around that.
I’m also going to recognize here that Sean has done a lot for the local economy. He led the Pop the Cap movement which let there be more breweries in Durham and beyond. Sean is a popular guy in the beer world, I get it, and he’s a very charismatic person. He’s made good and bad business decisions, he's human. But I do think his supporters have let him rest on his laurels a little too long for things he did nearly 20 years ago. It doesn’t excuse him from being generally shitty to the people who work for him and do the labor that has not only made Fullsteam function and stay afloat, but become so beloved.
What I’m focusing on here is that he owes his employees an apology and needs to work on himself and look at those Fullsteam Core Values a little harder.
WHY ARE PEOPLE MAD AT FULLSTEAM?
Continuing the narrative here...
By late 2023, us employees were starting to notice some weird things with management. They started getting real cagey? Longer-term employees would ask about raises or maybe even benefits and health insurance coverage and management would get snappy and defensive. Concerns about the building itself and questions about how we were going to deal with the construction outside got avoided or dismissed. It was a change in how we had come to relate to management.
We soon found out our longtime and beloved HR manager was going to be leaving in January 2024. Before he left, the HR manager sent the employees a survey about benefits and our hopes for health insurance, that we dutifully filled out. Then the meeting about that survey got pushed to "sometime in Q2 of 2024." We didn't have our quarterly meeting. I don't remember us having a holiday party that year. (I don't really care about a party, but it was just another sign of things changing.)
I think it was also around this time (when we were asking for raises and health insurance) that The Fucking Solar Tables were purchased for… $40,000? That's what I remember. Maybe it was only $20k but either way it was a real Fuck You to us employees who were being told we couldn't have raises, or health insurance, or paid time off after 5 years of service, or fix the canning machine, or hire another cook, or or or... but we could buy these solar tables! that no one could use because now we had a giant condo complex blocking the sun lol, and the dust from the construction covered the solar panels lol, and no one wants to sit outside with construction everywhere. (These solar tables also quickly became shelters for unhoused folks and people tried to charge their electric cars on them and Sean got mad but like, are we surprised?)
Okay now we get into the final stretch of Rigsbee being open (remember it closed Halloween 2024).
In early 2024, employees started asking for more transparency about what was happening at leadership meetings since we weren't having all-hands meetings or really any communication from leadership anymore. Sean stopped coming around the taproom as often and started avoided employee interaction.
Our HR manager was replaced by a consultant?? friend?? of Sean's named Mattie. We were instructed to tell Mattie our concerns. We told Mattie we wanted to know what was happening with our beloved workplace. Why won't management talk to us? (Mattie's Answer: they're busy but you can schedule a meeting with me.) What happened to that benefits survey? (Mattie's Answer: TBD) Can we have a representative of the employees attend leadership meetings to bring our concerns in a more private situation? (Mattie's Answer: No not really) Fine, can we have a town hall meeting to voice our concerns to leadership directly? (Answer: Fullsteam stopped paying Mattie so please stop trying to talk to him now)
The February 2024 townhall meeting that was (begrudgingly?) scheduled was unpaid, 10am Monday after Superbowl and therefore not well attended. It was Sean monologuing and telling us that we should stop asking to know what leadership is doing/talking about. That they will not be communicating with us. It was a huge blow to morale that leadership didn't care about our worries or attempts to connect with them. Certainly not Listening With Empathy or Thinking with Active Curiosity.
We were frustrated. We loved Fullsteam. We knew something weird was happening and we wanted to be part of the solution and Sean and management shut us out.
There was one more all-hands meeting in April 2024, at the Durham Bulls baseball field, where Sean told us everything was great and peachy and wow Fullsteam is doing so good we're all doing so good! okay! no questions please! bye. We each got $10 cash and we drank it away and stopped asking questions.
The morning of July 26, 2024, the kitchen staff (two who had worked there for years) learned about Fullsteam’s closing first and was told their last day would be July 31. The senior two quietly received several weeks pay of severance while the other newer kitchen employees never returned to work (don’t blame ‘em).
The rest of us learned about Fullsteam closing in a pre-recorded video message from Sean that same day, where he rather cheerfully told us that Fullsteam would be moving on from Rigsbee on Oct 31. The video message was totally tone deaf to the fact that he was announcing job loss and financial instability for loyal workers. He did not announce any future plans or any opportunities for employees who were about to lose their jobs.
I'll break continuity here to offer several ways you could have done this better, Sean:
- Hold a quick meeting for anyone on site to step away from their work for a minute to break the bad news in person
- Have your managers break workers into their small groups and break the news with them in teams so they can ask questions
- Have an all-hands meeting and tell us this and let people ask questions
- Have any amount of empathy and accountability about this news. it was good news for you, Sean, but for really no one else.
Sean made himself scarce around the building after the announcement. It felt, and still feels, like the most cowardly way to be a leader.
After the final day open to the public on October 31 2024, Sean did not stand up and share a few words. He did not let bar staff know what would happen next. Brewing staff and back of house continued to work as things wound down. There weren't lay offs, people just... slowly left one by one and everyone else picked up the slack until they got overwhelmed and pissed off and left too. Getting fired would have been preferable because then we could have at least received unemployment, but nope.
Eventually everything was done at Rigsbee and the big F got taken off the door.
Here’s some other shit that happened, in no particular order:
- Sean yelling at employee event workers and making them cry
- Employees working over 40 hours a week (i'm talking 60+ hour weeks) but not being paid overtime because they were "technically clocked in under different job titles doing different duties" (p sure this is wage theft btw)
- Scythe & Sparrow members have been paying into his club with dwindling benefits for years.
- Telling employees its our fault the recyling is overflowing when it simply was not picked up by the city for weeks
- Using Midjourney to generate AI art for cans, despite there being multiple artists on staff, and even a dedicated graphic designer (to his credit, i think he stopped using GenAI for art, but he still uses AI for a lot of other stuff)
- HR left and was not replaced, our tavern manager attempted to fill in the best she could but HR is actually a whole ass occupation and job
- Generally micromanaging, refusing to trust people he’s hired to do jobs they are qualified and experts in, and stepping on toes in every department.
You’ll notice a lack of familiar faces at the new location because word got around that Sean didn’t want former workers at the new ATC location.
I am confident that the vast majority of former employees feel slighted and/or angry at Sean. There’s a good chunk of Durham business owners that won’t work with Sean or carry Fullsteam beer anymore.
This post is an opportunity for Sean to turn this shit around, because I know people continue to support the original mission and values. I personally don’t want to give my money to Sean until I know the workers making that dream come true are being treated correctly.
Anyway, sorry this is long, but I figured clarity is more important than brevity for nuanced shit like this.
