OLIVE BRANCH, MS - The city of Olive Branch, MS, is bracing for two long-time industries to shut their doors.
By next year, the Sherwin Williams paint plant and Quebecor World Inc. will have moved out. Between the two closures, around 400 jobs will be lost.
Of course, it's not just the plant employees who will be affected by this. Local businesses-- like Hazel's Family Restaurant-- will feel the impact.
A lot of the lunch-time traffic at Hazel's comes from local workers. Owner Hazel Gross says that includes employee's from Sherwin Williams and printing and publishing company Quebecor.
“If they don't have a job, they can't go out to eat” says Gross. “Sometimes it hurts and you can see it right away and then sometimes it's slowly-- depending on how much people can afford to take their families out.”
To folks like Hazel Gross, Mayor Sam Rikard says he's working on it-- trying to recruit new businesses to fill the void.
“We're actually working with 3 different companies that Olive Branch is on the short list for. If all of them came here, we're talking about 700 to 800 jobs” says Rikard.
Rikard is staying very tight-lipped about the details, saying only that he's fighting hard because in this city of 32,000 people, a few hundred jobs lost leaves a big impression-- especially in a recession.
“In times past, if we had a company that shut down and 100 jobs were lost, they would quickly absorb by the other industries in the area, but now things are different” says Rikard.
Both plants will be fully shut down by the end of the year. Sherwin Williams and Quebecor blame the closures on factors related to the struggling U.S. economy.
