McDonalds promoted mass employment. Very few locations actually hired.

http://theloop21.com/money/supersize-economy

by RobIsIT • 15 years ago

15 17 15 years ago

shareme• 15 years ago

IN the US we have something called the FTC truth-in-advertising act I wonder how fast some Lawyer volunteers to do a class action suit against McDonalds for false advertising?

jswinghammer4• 15 years ago

There can be any number of reasons why people didn't get jobs. Not sure you can sue them for failing to hire a large group of people.

smackfu3• 15 years ago

McDonald's will surely release a press release saying that they hired 50,000 people. How would you prove them wrong?

michaelochurch4• 15 years ago

Hard to do. I don't know how McDonald's works per se, but most chain stores employ an almost completely part-time workforce. "Hiring drives" mean that they are trying to get more people on the payroll, but the budgets for the individual stores don't increase. So not much actual hiring occurs, because the incentive system discourages it.

jswinghammer4• 15 years ago

One thing that I've noticed about McDonald's is the sort of people who work there in cities versus the country. I grew up in the country and McDonald's was a place for kids to work. In the city it's a place where adults work. I suppose given the choice I'd rather hire adults but I'm not sure how an adult supports themselves in a city like Boston on what they pay.

zeemonkee• 15 years ago

Could be they work at MacDonalds to supplement their major source of income (pension, working partner etc).

jswinghammer4• 15 years ago

From my limited observation it seems like that might be possible. Many of their workers seem to be Haitian or Chinese immigrants. I don't really go there for anything but the occasional strawberry shake so my sample size is pretty small.

michaelochurch4• 15 years ago

I remember walking into a McDonald's (early '90s) in an Arizona "gray town". My dad and I were the only people under 60 in the place.

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.

lawnchair_larry• 15 years ago

I think it depends more on the job market in general. When there is a shortage of jobs and high unemployment, McDonalds can hire more mature staff. When there is a labor shortage, anyone with a pulse can get a "better" job, so that is when you see the 15 year olds working at McDonalds.

This was the case where I grew up, as I watched the city go from modest to booming.

smackfu3• 15 years ago

50,000 jobs sounds like a lot until you realize there are over 13,000 McDonalds in the U.S. And he had a sample size of four?

klbarry• 15 years ago

4 per location is still a lot of hirings. Not to mention if each of the 50,000 cost $10,000 yearly in salary, the cost to McDonalds is 500 mil.

smackfu3• 15 years ago

You are assuming they are all new positions, when we know that fast food has extremely high turnover. Just putting in a two-week hiring freeze in advance of the date would probably generate a huge number of open jobs.

icefox• 15 years ago

While it read very negative the end sums it up in a much better light:

"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."

michaelochurch4• 15 years ago

Americans really, really don't understand what poverty is, why it exists, and how it works. Nor do they comprehend why it must be fought and how hard it is to fight. This is because most Americans haven't been face-to-face with actual poverty in 50 years and now that it's creeping up on them in the less fortunate reaches of the country, they don't know what is going on.

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.

jswinghammer4• 15 years ago

Well it's likely that Americans will experience such poverty again given the course things seem to be heading on.

michaelochurch4• 15 years ago

It's possible. A lot of bad ideas that seemed to die in the mid-20th century and were supposed to turn to ash by 2000 instead came back with a vengeance in 1973-Present in forms such as "trickle down economics" and neoconservatism.

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.

steevdave• 15 years ago

I agree with the author that the stigma is that you only work at McDonalds if you are a loser. At least in major cities. I grew up in the country as well and perhaps the teachings are a tad different there. I was taught that any income is better than no income. And McDonalds is some income. Now all you see are a bunch of people attempting to become the next Facebook, google or Color. Too many people think that if they work at McDonalds or any other fast food joint that they are stuck there instead of realizing that they are actually contributing more than just slaving away.

McDonalds promoted mass employment. Very few locations actually hired.

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