About four months ago, October of 2016, a new Cheesecake Factory restaurant opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, ten miles from where I live. If you check out this news clip from WFMY News 2, you'll hear that over 7500 people applied for 255 restaurant jobs. That's not a typo, 7,500 people, enough to populate a good-sized small town, applied for jobs at a SINGLE NEW RESTAURANT. Greensboro has about 285,000 residents, so that's a big chunk of the population.
This kind of thing is happening across much of the country. We have a huge jobs issue in this country, and the main issue is that towns and cities that thrived during the Industrial Age don't know how to create jobs in the new Information (or Digital or Creative) age. The old rules don't apply any more, and many civic leaders are so busy with day to day issues that they haven't learned this yet.
Creative Scenes, like art scenes, music scenes, video/filmmaking scenes, action sports scenes, boutique shop scenes, and entrepreneurial scenes are now a significant part of the job creation process. They create and incubate small businesses, and they also help attract the clusters of tech workers that major tech firms look for when opening a new facility. This is a HUGE issue and not many people are really working on it at the grassroots level. So now I am. Stay tuned for more on this subject.
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