McDonalds promoted mass employment. Very few locations actually hired.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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?