Whats the Effect on Employment and Entrepreneurial Skills?
Both local retailers and national chain outlets hire employees, but there are important differences. The owner or manager of a local store is an entrepreneur in every sense, developing skills in buying, selling, planning and management that cannot be learned in any other way. Local businesses also employ people with specialized skills, like bookkeepers, who perform functions that in a national chain might only be done in a single national office. This is not to degrade the work done by chainstore employees, only to point out that the jobs available in national outlets are likely to be one-dimensional jobs, providing training in only a narrow aspect of a business. The loss of a community base of entrepreneurial skills is an issue that needs to be explored, but there are others. How does the entry level pay of employees compare with community-based retailers? How often are experienced managerial employees transferred out of an area as a matter of company policy? How well do national chai
