New fast-food outlets don't 'create' jobs — they put extra pressure on our communities

The fast-food model delivers handsome profits to shareholders. But, far from creating jobs, each new opening puts further pressure on our communities and businesses, writes RICHARD JACOB

Announcements of new fast-food franchises — most recently Applegreen’s plan to open Popeyes restaurants — are often greeted with headlines that they will ‘create’ jobs. But Richard Jacob writes that they are in fact moving jobs from existing independent businesses. Picture: Applegreen

If you put a fox into a hen house, you have not increased your flock size. You just have more animals, for a brief moment in time.

We read last week that “Applegreen is to create up to 450 jobs” by bringing the Popeyes fried chicken franchise to its petrol stations this year. Unless Applegreen have devised a way of making people eat an extra meal, they have not created new jobs, they have merely moved them. (Of course, some would say that ultra-processed food does in fact encourage people to eat an extra meal, with its sweet, salty, fat-dense food being presented as a snack that doesn’t really count.)