What restricts rural towns from getting franchised stores?
The main thing I would say would be that many small towns can’t support too much “big business” regardless of whether they are serving one town or seven or eight towns. I also live in a town of around 6000 residents (in rural NSW). We are only 90-100 minutes from Canberra and we have McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Woolies, IGA, Big W, Harvey Norman, and Joyce Maine. I know at least one or two of these big businesses are struggling because there is just not enough support from our town and visitors to our town to keep the business financially viable in the town. Any more big business and there’d be store closures. Many of the people I know in town are more than happy to travel to Canberra, or to other larger towns (20-40 thousand residents) that exist within 1.5-2 hours from us to do anything more major than grocery shopping. It’s part of country life, and is the norm. It’s the best way for the economies of all country towns to survive. I’d put it all down to finances of the businesses and of
