It only gets more frustrating when you learn how franchising works too. The pseudo “owner” of a location doesn’t have much say in anything in particular and doesn’t have much of a budget to do the right things with because they spend everything to have the names, logos, ingredients, recipes, and specific equipment, and there are very tight specs to fall within that can get inspected at any time. So it’s clear that the “owner” should hire enough staff and pay them enough to attract good workers who will make it possible for you to buy a mcflurry, but that “owner” probably pulls 60-90 hour weeks for only about double the rate of what their lowest paid employee makes. They tend to get suckered in because it looks so good on paper but it’s so much worse than it seems. They thought they were signing up to be capitalists and instead they just become a slightly different tier of exploited laborer with much higher stress because of personal investment in the failure or success of the location. They’re effectively indentured servants. The standard workers at least have the freedom to say fuck you and go get a different job without actually losing anything.

If a franchise unionizes, I think that it should be collective for all of the laborers to have security against the corporations ratfucking interests. Corporations want us to demonize their proxy lightning rod location “owners” but we should see through that bullshit.