Wynski that mission in Foothills is on a busy shop-filled street, BUT there is no door to get in on the high traffic street. The door is around back in the parking lot. So you have to know where it is to go in. There is no signage on the busy street side. In the parking lot they have covered their big window with posters etc so as to keep people from looking in and taking pictures. There was an ex Scn in the area who used to take pics of the empty Msn and send the pics to Mike and they didn’t like that!

Cyndi, thanks for confirming another case of missions being subsidized – I forgot to mention that in some case “whales” or local members are roped in to help pay the bills, too (and reportedly sometimes at orgs, as well).

I’d love to know how Foothills gets by. We see them quite often here in promo pieces, so they obviously have an energetic mission holder, but I suspect that’s also someone who’s propping them up financially – or maybe they just do a good job of hiding the fact that they really run another businessout of the commercial/industrial space that they’re in, allowing them to host the mission.

Foothills is also on my list of missions to check on eventually and see how they’ve weathered the current crisis. I’m guessing that it will be the nail in the coffin for a lot of struggling ones – and provide missionholders who’ve been carrying them, with an excuse to get out from under the financial burden. Though it would be typical that first missions would nominally continue to exist, and just switch their address to a mail drop or the missionholder’s home.

I just checked the CofS official list, and two of the missions that were obviously on their last legs, bouncing around between low rent spaces, Milwaukee and Cleveland, no longer even have addresses. Also, it was recently reported that the New Orleans mission moved into the missionholder’s home. That’s the wave of the future in Scientology’s “expansion”….

Right Cindy. The mission in Montrose on that shop filled street with tons of foot traffic was the last scamology thing standing in that area. Sunland had no real traffic as far back as the 90’s.

Most likely true Peace. I don’t of an OT 8 “mission holder” in Spain that has a similar set up. Or at least he did when I lived over there about 16 years ago.

So true, Peacemaker and Wynski. And to add to that, the Sunland Mission of Sunland, CA for many years had an OT or two paying the electrical bill on the place and the rent too because they were so downstat they couldn’t cover any of that. I think when the OT ran out of money is when the Sunland Mission closed its doors completely. (This is not the same one as the Foothills Msn which is still in biz.) I got this insider bit of into from my daughter who was on staff and knew all the behind the scenes things at that time.

Ms. B., the missions seem to have pioneered some of the brutal sales techniques – or at least helped pilot them. A while back I decided to research what actually went on in the missions in the 1970s and early 1980s, and found accounts of all sorts of hard core practices including relentless exploitation of people’s “ruin” followed up by unjustifiable over-promising of results, pile-on “gang bang” style techniques and use of hidden microphones, plus mis-use of credit including fraudulent loans – very reminiscent of what we now hear complaints of Scientology orgs doing in more recent times.

I don’t know why the missions of that era get seen through rose-colored glasses and treated with such nostalgia, except that a few of the smaller ones must have been more friendly places, and those former members still around commenting must have been lucky to have avoided much of the worst of the rip-offs and abuse. One or two of the missions were even running their own fraudulent credit unions, where not only members but under-paid staff were taking out loans, and eventually it resulted in a law enforcement raid and criminal case – a bit of inconvenient history that’s apparently mostly been swept under the rug.

Any reg worth their salt at a mission can be just as ruthless as an upper org reg. It reminds me of a joke that a mission reg once told me.

There was a guy in a bar hunched over an almost empty pint wearing a spaghetti stained tee shirt. Clearly in need of a refill but having no money, he tells the bar keep that he can squeeze a cup of lemon juice out of one of the lemons sitting on the bar for a refilled pint. The bar keep takes him up on it. After considerable grunting, groaning, moaning and much heavy breathing spaghetti stain produces a cup of lemon juice for the bar keep. After consuming that pint, ol’ spaghetti stains says that for a pitcher of ale he could produce another cup of juice from the same lemon. The bar keep eagerly takes him up on the challenge. After a couple of hours of intense effort, a cup of lemon juice is produced from the same lemon. Incredulous, the bar keep asks him the secret of his success. Ol’ spaghetti stains confesses that he used to be a ASHO reg.

Although the lemon analogy is a stretch, I have witnessed several times when a scientology mark has been drained of far more than they can ever hope to repay. Bankruptcy, financial ruin and worse soon follow. What’s worse? Losing friends and family you “borrowed” money from promising quick repayment that can’t be made. And still the regges are after more if you’re stupid enough to fall for their pleas again.

Maybe someone should have put Tubbo on to this –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGdgS4zirc

Nice story Coop. I have had many similar stories and your’s brought back some nasty memories. I guess in cult lingo I underwent a bit of ‘restim’. For me these things usually started out one on one with a reg. If there was too much resistance it turned into a tag team or gang bang style shake down. Gang bang style is the more appropriate terminology. You ALWAYS walk away feeling like you’ve just been royally fucked in the ass even though you sometimes come out ahead financially by standing your ground.

Wynski, I know of an old mission being kept open by an aging franchisee who completed OTVIII a few years ago. I think he’s an old field auditor who may well still have a profitable practice given the high-income, alternative-minded area where he’s located – and, come to think of it, he probably gets FSM commissions off of his flock as well. So it’s quite possible that his income from Scientology more than covers the expense of keeping the mission open, even though paying for it to be in high-visibility commercial space is now almost totally superfluous to his actual operations.

Come to think of it, he may be one of what were once the standalone field auditors who I’ve read were virtually required to buy mission packagages when Scientology was making a push for that decades ago. I know for certain that some of the missions that disappeared in decades past were really just small office or home-based field auditing practices. So I think it’s pretty likely that some of the small remaining missions are actually more private field auditing practices, forced by Scientology requirements to bear the cost of maintaining unnecessarily large publicly-accessible locations, cutting into income but still not necessarily putting them in the red.

But I agree, a lot of missions now must operate at a loss as far as Scientology goes, supported by mission holders who have other sources of income, and pay to keep them open as one of their forms of obeisance to the CofS.