I’m surprised more people haven’t made this connection. The other day McDonalds’s CEO announced that the company would be franchising 3,500 of its own-operated stores. That didn’t get a lot of attention outside the business publications. Here’s the sequence of events:
- To much fanfare, McDonalds announces it will be increasing the wages of minimum wage employees in the stores that it owns itself.
- That won’t apply to the franchised stores.
- The beancounters at the company run the numbers and determine that the increased wages will render many of the stores unprofitable.
- The company announces it will sell of more than half its own-operated stores.
It’s possible that the company already planned this move before their pay raise announcement. That would have been pretty cynical, wouldn’t it.
I feel sorry for McDonalds’s poor employees. They get a pay raise only to have it yanked away by the new franchisees.
Wow. That’s up there w/ Bob Iger saying we need to import more foreigners to do the IT work because Americans can’t/won’t, while laying off American IT workers so he can replace them with foreigners.
Even for an American corporation this is villainous. Bet you won’t hear the progressives lauding the pay raise talking about this new development. Why? Because they never gave a damn and were looking only for donations and media attention.