Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

Chatelain, a historian, examined the relationship between McDonald's and Black communities in the United States, and won the Pulitzer Prize for history for it.

Her argument is that fast food franchising became a substitute for structural economic change. After the urban uprisings of the 1960s, government and business responded with programmes promoting Black business ownership rather than with redistribution or with employment programmes. Franchising fitted this: it created Black-owned businesses without requiring any transfer of wealth, since the franchisee borrowed to buy in, and it directed federal loan guarantees toward that purpose. Chatelain traces how McDonald's, initially reluctant, came to see inner-city locations as a market and Black franchisees as the operators who could hold them, particularly after boycotts and pressure from Black organisations.

The economics she documents complicate the success story. Black franchisees were frequently placed in locations with higher costs, higher insurance, higher security expenses and lower average transaction values than suburban stores, so their unit economics were worse while their capital requirements were the same. The National Black McDonald's Operators Association was formed partly to press these grievances, and litigation over location allocation continued for decades.

Her wider argument concerns the civil rights movement's economic turn. As integration was achieved legally, Black economic advancement was pursued through business ownership, which produced a constituency with an interest in the industry's expansion and complicated criticism of its health and labour effects in the communities it served.

The book is academic history with a clear argument and extensive research. It is one interpretation of a complicated relationship, and readers may weigh the trade-off she describes differently. The documentation of franchise economics by location is the empirical contribution.