A franchise, generally, confers the right to use the franchisor’s trade marks and other intellectual property along with the obligation to maintain the franchisor’s standards associated with that intellectual property. A franchisor who doesn’t have quality control processes risks being found to have “abandoned” or “naked licensed” their i.p. And when a franchisee doesn’t live up to quality standards, there’s generally hell to pay. Because local failures in franchise quality can have a national impact on the franchise brand.
This is a political article.
The image above is from a local road in the small city where I live.
There was a problem with the road flooding at high tide, because most of the road is below the high water mark and there is a storm drain (just below the sign post in the image above) that connects directly to a tidal pond.
The city spent three years and several million dollars to rebuild the road. At exactly the same height as it had been. Then they found out that it still flooded. So they put up this sign: the one actual “improvement” that was achieved at fairly large expenditure and inconvenience to the voting public.
Things like this make the average person tend to conclude that government is stupid and wasteful. The average person also tends to think that Democrats are “pro” government spending and Republicans are “pro” shrinking the government (never mind whether these thoughts are accurate).
So where I’m going with this: if Democrats, when they’re in national power, want to stay there, then they need to start exercising rigorous quality control on Democratic local and state governments. Otherwise, the local nonsense has an insidious impact on the perceived value of the national brand.
