This was the case where I grew up, as I watched the city go from modest to booming.
They were good, too. They were a bit slower, the average age in the place probably being 70, but they had a much better work ethic than most people in fast food.
The stores in these towns are dying because people don't have money to spend in them, and because the stores are dying, people have even less money and more stores have to close. It's a self-accelerating process. Even McDonald's is not immune: it's still unaffordable for the truly poor, so as people slide, its revenues are going to decline like everything else. Conservatives believe poverty is a "moral medicine" that toughens up the good and kills off the weak. Wrong. It's a cancer.
For a more ground-level analysis of this, what actually happens during corporate-chain hiring drives is that the individual stores have tight seatbelts and the budgets often don't increase. The corporate office may decide to have a "hiring drive" but it doesn't increase the stores' budgets. The goal of the "hiring drive" is not to increase staffing but to take in new people and fire some, or to ensure that workers who are currently getting overtime no longer do. (Workers in low-paid hourly positions often love overtime, but managers don't like having to pay it out.) Thus, hiring new people means that those are there have to take hours cuts or get laid off. Generally, managers would rather keep the people they have than hire someone new and have to cut other peoples' hours, hurting morale across the board. So the incentive structure in such hiring drives is such that very little actual hiring will take place. Serious hiring only happens if (a) the budget increases, or (b) people are working overtime and corporate comes down on the store manager for paying out too much time-and-a-half.
The Reaganites were incredibly naive and short-sighted, being too young to remember the Great Depression. So they thought the egalitarian and regulatory seatbelts of the 1940-1975 era were horrible encumbrances. They had no idea, in the 1980s, what they would set in motion. The smarter ones left the conservative bandwagon before the disastrous presidency of Bush II, but by this point the Juggernaut (5/3, cannot be blocked by walls) was in motion.
"In some cases, McDonald’s franchises may have taken the opportunity to truly hire new employees. But, for the most part it was for show. Even the second largest commercial employer in America can’t solve our recessionary woes, but it’s nice to know that at least somewhere along the line they made an attempt."
