I live in central Illinois in a university town. The going rate for fast food workers was somewhere around $12 per hour back around 2008 when the the great recession hit. Nobody works for $7 a hour these days.
Knoxville is not a Northern university town, though, is it? The fact that no Americans actually work for $7 an hour is kinda the point: Mega-corporations complain they can’t find Labor (for $7 an hour) and push to allow millions of illegal aliens who do work for those wages. And since no-one can possibly live on $7/hr, the government pays for their housing, education, healthcare, food, internet service, etc. Sure, illegal aliens don’t qualify, technically, but their kids do. So every minimum-wage worker ends up being subsidized by the government to the tune of on average over $40,000/year. (In Pennsylvania in 2016, it was $68,000.)