Economic extraction: Wait, do you mean big box "dark" stores want property tax breaks that aren't available to indie businesses? I'm shocked. SHOCKED.

You know, principles and shit.

I've arranged Stacy Mitchell's tweets in essay format. As Mitchell notes, the discussion goes back several years, and here's one of ours on the topic; it was another fruitless attempt to convince Develop New Albany to lead discussions that actually matter to local independent business owners.

Challenges for independent local businesses include one-way streets and Big Box tax evasion.

It's always worth re-examining the consequences of civic and corporate greed colliding.

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Big-box retailers like Walmart & Target are not economic development. They’re a form of economic extraction. Always have been. Now they’re engaged in a new phase of extraction that’s costing communities even more.

In 21 states, big-box retailers are contesting their property values — claiming their busy buildings are obsolete & thus worth very little. They’re getting their taxes slashed & often winning huge refunds for previous payments.

This tactic is crippling the finances of many local governments, forcing homeowners & small businesses to pay higher tax bills.

In Texas, for example, the state’s comptroller says cities and schools will lose $2.6 billion in revenue per year because of big retailers' “dark store” property tax claims.

(As an aside: this has been strangely slow to get media notice. We wrote the first national story way back in 2015 … Finally @CityLab and the @nytimes have done in-depth pieces recently.) 

I have mixed reactions on who to blame. On the one hand, the mega-retailers are nasty. They came in promising lots of tax revenue to these towns. But their goal has always been to extract as much as possible & leave as little money behind as they could.

On the other hand, many city officials have been so stupid about big-box stores. There was plenty of evidence 10-20 years ago that approving these stores was a bad idea.

Big-box stores drove massive consolidation in the retail sector. About 100k local retailers disappeared in a decade. More jobs were lost than created. Civic and social networks deteriorated as Main Street did.

This was all known at the time. There were published studies on the net job losses, for example. I wrote a book in 2006 called Big-Box Swindle. People like @SprawlBusters went around the country explaining the consequences of saying yes to Walmart’s store proposals.

Some places got it. Vermont said no to big-box retail in a sweeping way. Today VT has more small businesses per capita than any other state. And not a lot of vacant retail.

But most cities and towns, often over the objections of their residents, said yes, yes, yes to the big boxes. The main reason was all that tax revenue.

You don’t have to be expert in city finances to see why this was so dumb. Just think about it. First, sprawl is super expensive. Big box stores cost local governments a lot more in services, like road maintenance & police, than compact “Main Street” style districts do.

Second, even when they’re new, big-box stores generate far less tax revenue per acre than downtown and neighborhood business districts do. This is because parking lots have little value and their buildings are cheap too.

Walmart, Home Depot, Target – they all presented a very different picture to cities about how this was durable economic development. But city officials should have known better. It was not hard to see the truth. 

So this whole push the mega-retailers are making today to have their stores reassessed as basically worthless is them doing the big reveal on what was true all along. 

Well-built, multi-story, mixed used business districts can endure for centuries. They are durable, flexible, adaptable as things change. They are great habitat for incubating new entrepreneurs. They are great at nurturing social & civic engagement. 

More towns and cities should have defended these districts rather than handing over their future to big-box sprawl. 

But – and this is important – I want to be clear about what should happen now. As stupid as city officials were, communities should not be paying the price for Walmart’s wealth and dominance.

The “dark store” tactic these companies are using to slash their property taxes should be outlawed by state legislatures. There are bills in these states to do so. And then cities should pass a special tax on big-box stores to make up for all the additional costs they impose.

Finally, cities need to get wise to the fact that not all development is actually economic development. If it furthers the power of the biggest companies, it’s often extractive. 
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Here’s your first test, cities: Amazon. Extractive or additive? Should you give it subsidies? Should you shift your procurement to Amazon? Or should you call for vigorous antitrust action to check its power? 

Chain and big box subsidies cost us far more than we imagine, but who cares so long as Starbucks is there?

From the linked Strong Towns article.

I've always wondered if the presumed "neutrality" of chains and big boxes -- they're generic and identical from place to place, all buttons with no fingers -- fills some sort of psychological need in those for whom "localism" implies not a set of economic nuts and bolts, but the local community's parochialism (or worse).

There always have been adherents to internationalism as a corrective to narrower nationalism (or localism), as applicable to seemingly universal belief systems otherwise diametrically opposed: Communism's Internationale versus the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, for example.

As such: "I belong to the worldwide fraternity of Chipotle, where consistency and safety everywhere are the ultimate filters against the messiness of individualism and diversity -- which barely exist in my burg, anyway." 

Admittedly, it's probably more likely that identification with chains and big boxes owes to the narcissistic qualities of consumer culture; I want this or that, and for so long as the price is right, the costs to others be damned.

Or, maybe, that few of us bother to think at all.

Before the Strong Towns link, there's this transcript of a podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, with ILSR's Stacy Mitchell and Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First.

It’s estimated, best ballpark number we have right now, that states and cities spend at least 70 billion, with a B, dollars a year in economic development incentives, and by far most of that is tax breaks, property tax abatements, sales tax exemptions, corporate income tax credits, R&D credits, film production credits. There’s a big menu. The average state has dozens of such programs on the books, which in turn are often locally administered.

Tax increment financing districts, enterprise zones, industrial revenue bonds, all those come under this category. The truth is, as you said, although some of the programs are justified in the name of helping small businesses or helping struggling neighborhoods, and in some cases that’s the way the programs were originally structured and written, over time they’ve become deregulated. Over time they’ve become give-mes that can go anywhere.

So we have TIF districts at the fringe of urban areas piling up apple orchards for Walmart Supercenters. We have subsidies for Amazon sortation centers that are just undermining Macy’s and K-Mart and Sears and all the other retail chains that are laying people off. We have an affluent suburb of Missouri, Des Peres, Missouri, outside of St. Louis, saying or mall is blighted because we don’t have a Nordstrom yet. We need to give a $31 million TIF deal this multinational REIT that owns this mall so that they won’t be blighted anymore and can subsidize bringing in a Nordstrom. It’s gotten really perverse. The anti-poverty argument has been turned upside down and on its head frankly over and over.

In short, government picks winners, and the chosen winners usually are the ones who had enough money to start with.

BIG BOX STORES ARE COSTING OUR CITIES FAR MORE THAN WE EVER IMAGINED, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

Drive a little ways out from the center of any town and you’re likely to find several big box stores—Target, Home Depot, Piggly Wiggly, you name it. They’re everywhere. If you took a helicopter or a drone above these parts of town, you’d likely see a vast amount of land taken up with just a handful of stores and their accompanying parking lots. The houses and small businesses around them would be dwarfed in comparison. Not only do they use up a ton of land, but as a result, big box stores also demand miles of public infrastructure like pipes and roads to serve them.

But here’s the crazy part: Those enormous stores are paying a negligible amount in taxes. For their size, they are contributing hardly anything while meanwhile demanding new electric lines and frontage roads and signalized intersections (among other things). In most cases, their taxes are not nearly enough to pay for the maintenance of these basic services, let alone the many other functions of our local governments that we expect taxes to pay for, like schools and fire protection.

Here’s a textbook example of this, created by our friends at Urban3, a firm that analyzes the relationship between building design and tax production. The illustration below shows the tax value of a big box store near Asheville, North Carolina, compared with a modest downtown building. Pay special attention to the taxes per acre.

"Swaps" to support local businesses -- because, DEATH TO CHAINS.

In terms of size, there are no useful analogies between the nation's capital and New Albany. We're obviously far smaller, but I like the spirit of this piece, which is transferable to our town in one specific instance.

Chain Reaction: Make These Five Swaps to Support Local Businesses, by Laura Hayes (Washington City Paper)

Next time you’re standing in front of a chain eatery that serves the cuisine you’re craving, consider walking a few blocks farther to find the locally owned version. It may be more important than ever to open your wallet at small, District-born businesses ...

An example of the formatting:

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen (3200 Bladensburg Road NE) ---> Mason Dixie Biscuit Company (2301 Bladensburg Road NE)

Walk or drive 0.9 miles.

Popeyes has history on its side. The chain was born 45 years ago in New Orleans and now has 2,600 restaurants in the U.S. and around the world. But local fried chicken and biscuit slinger Mason Dixie Biscuit Company has some accolades of its own, including winning “Best Biscuit in America, Critic’s Choice” at the 2015 International Biscuit Festival. Its classic fried chicken thigh sandwich is made from hormone-free chicken.

The specific instance I have in mind is downtown's proximity to the clustermuck of State Street chains -- with more on the way courtesy of Jeff Gahan's tacky Summit Springs corporate advancement development.

To be sure, there are a few legitimate indies along the State Street corridor, including Tucker's, Bridge Liquors and Green Tea Chinese.

But note that the distance between Bob Evans on State and Toast on Market is exactly two miles, and between Home Depot and PC Home Center even less.

Our experience in New Albany with independent business advocacy has not been favorable. I'd suggest very strongly that business owners may wish to reconsider the merits of unity in this regard, especially with the next Sherman Minton Bridge closing less than four years away.

This time we know when the bridge is to be closed, and can prepare an advancement of "togetherness" indie consciousness in advance -- or, conversely, flail valiantly all alone.

It's our choice.

LIVE TO EAT: Chick-fil-A, that "billion-dollar company whose foundation spent a small fortune funding groups that oppose equal rights for marginalized and bullied people."

A useful reminder why not.

Why does Deaf needs Chick-fil-A as a sponsor, anyway?

Shouldn't it be Bob Norwood's insurance company?

Surely he could microwave chicken in a pinch.

Review: You Probably Shouldn’t Eat at Chick-fil-A, by Ryan Sutton (Eater)

The fast-food giant serves up some solid food, but with a side of unpalatable baggage

People love Chick-fil-A, the poultry-centric fast-food chain whose corporate purpose is to “glorify God,” and whose strict Sunday closure means that every employee gets at least one day of rest.

People love the carnival-like waffle fries, the neonatal ward-like hospitality, the cleanliness on par with a Silicon Valley chip manufacturer, the fresh-squeezed lemonade spiked with soft-serve ice cream, the aromatic peach shakes, the admirably bare-bones fried-chicken sandwich, the viral fan song set to the tune of the Beatles’s “Yesterday,” and the famous Polynesian sauce, an agrodolce condiment that looks like what would happen if a stop sign were melted down in a magical volcano made of pineapple, ginger, and corn syrup.

People don’t love Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based, family-owned chain that’s heavily rooted in the South but that’s expanding aggressively into new markets like New York and Washington, fueling long lines and, occasionally, opposition. Millions of dollars of the chain’s past profits funded groups that opposed same-sex marriage during an era when millions of Americans were fighting for their civil rights; smaller donations went to a group that practiced conversion therapy, a practice that stems from the discredited belief that homosexuality is a mental illness.

About a year before the Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013, chief executive Dan Cathy said that “we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.” Following an uproar over those comments, Chick-fil-A pledged, on Facebook, to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena, and “to treat everyone “with honor, dignity and respect,” regardless of sexual orientation.

This is all to say, reckoning with Chick-fil-A is complicated. There’s the social question, which is how a Biblically grounded institution — whose $8 billion in sales dwarf KFC’s domestic operations — will fare as it expands outside of regions where it’s perceived as a beloved community cornerstone, rather than a venue whose mere presence evokes the type of anger normally directed at unqualified politicians.

And there’s the culinary question, which is whether you should brave the (fast-moving) lines at the home of the “original” pressure-fried chicken sandwich, or whether you should patronize more ambitious (and progressive) poultry-purveying peers like Fuku (only in New York) or Shake Shack.

Oh, and by (buy?) the way ...

Death to chains, by the numbers -- "The Multiplier Effect of Local Independent Businesses."

The obvious question: If local independent business recirculates more revenue locally, why do the local government economic incentives and abatements inevitably flow to the chains?

The most recent example is Summit Springs. City Hall happily bills itself as a partner in this development, and city funds will be used to make it a reality. There'll be two hotels, both chains, along with three restaurants (need we ask?), on a commercial strip already dominated by big box retail.

In effect, in this and other projects like it, the city overlooks the multiplier by subsidizing the businesses most likely to recirculate less revenue locally.

The Multiplier Effect of Local Independent Businesses (AMIBA)

Clearly communicating the importance of the local economic multiplier effect or “local premium” is a key part of effective “buy local” and public education campaigns. The multiplier results from the fact that independent locally-owned businesses recirculate a far greater percentage of revenue locally compared to absentee-owned businesses (or locally-owned franchises ... in other words, going local creates more local wealth and jobs.

I can hear the excuses now -- except I can't. City Hall doesn't publicly discuss matters like this, does it?

And that's the real problem, isn't it?

Meanwhile, even the area's premier publication for chain glorification gets the memo.

Chain restaurants only do three things better than independents, study says, by David A. Mann (Louisville Business First)

Independent restaurants seem to have an advantage over their chain counterparts in a number of different operational and emotional metrics, according to a new consumer study.

The study came from industry consulting firm Pentallect and research partner Critical Mix. Consumers give independents the edge in 12 of 15 metrics being surveyed.

Independent restaurants seem to have an advantage over their chain counterparts in a number of different operational and emotional metrics, according to a new consumer study ...

Death (and bizarre zombie afterlife) to chains.

I have a dim memory of seeing that Chi Chi's in Luxembourg, probably in 2002. Kenny Rogers Roasters food never passed my lips. Rax? Maybe in the 1970s.

Death to chains, people.

The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains, by Ernie Smith (Atlas Obscura)

Losing can be an opportunity to do something different.

... So it wasn’t a surprise then, when (Kenny Rogers Roasters) eventually faltered, and, by 1998, Rogers himself was trying to disassociate himself. The company was sold in 1999 to Nathan’s, the hot dog chain, and after years of declines, the chain—which once had over 300 locations—closed its last location in North America in 2011.

The real story, though, is what happened just before that. Because while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008. Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S.

And, last year, the chain opened up its first Indian location, with the goal of reaching $10 million in sales and 40 to 50 locations in India alone by 2021.

Now, there are more than 400 locations worldwide—topping its ‘90s peak and, in the process becoming one of a number of chains that have faltered domestically but gone on to have strange, often lucrative second lives, whether they exist, like Kenny Rogers Roasters, as successful American exports or whether they persist, like the last remaining Chi Chi’s restaurants in Belgium and Luxembourg, as a wildly diminished if improbably stubborn reminders of a chain’s former greatness.

Challenges for independent local businesses include one-way streets and Big Box tax evasion.

Break the chains, build local power.

On the eve of another monthly merchant meeting (Tuesday morning, 8:30 a.m., Cafe 157 at the corner of Main and Bank), here's a look back at a discussion starter from February.

Thursday Must Read Part 1: Upsides and downsides in a national independent business survey.

 ... Public policy challenges, eh?

In New Albany, one virulent 800-lb public policy gorilla is downtown's one-way street grid, which study after study has proven to be harmful to the interests of small, local, independently-owned businesses.

And yet, more than a few business owners in New Albany either don't wish to "rock" the boat, or worse, to take the time to understand the issues involved.

Think about it: If one-way streets hurt businesses like yours, then they do so 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Conversely, reversion to two-way would help your business -- 24 hours a day, every day of the year. You're fighting a battle with one arm tied behind your back -- by the city itself. The fact that the likes of Bob Caesar lobbies against reform should be the clearest possible indication that reform is both correct and necessary.

In addition, coming on the heels of today's previous post ("The dirty little secret of big box development – and it’s really not a secret – is that the buildings are designed to be abandoned"), here's another look at the big-box tail wagging the dog.

For Cities, Big-Box Stores Are Becoming Even More of a Terrible Deal, by Olivia LaVecchia (Institute for Local Self-Reliance)

Big-box retailers’ new tactic to slash their taxes is the latest example of why cities are better off saying no to the boxes and cultivating Main Streets instead.

... Marquette has been hit hard by a tactic that the country’s biggest retailers are using to slash their property taxes. Known as the “dark store” method, it exemplifies the systematic way that these chains extract money from local governments. It’s also the latest example of the way that, even as local governments across the country continue to bend over backwards to attract and accommodate big-box development, these stores are consistently a terrible deal for the towns and cities where they locate.

Because ... without principles and a system of values prefacing independent small business ownership, why work so damned hard?

Shouldn't local government be helping, not pushing back?

"The dirty little secret of big box development – and it’s really not a secret – is that the buildings are designed to be abandoned."

It's Big Box Week at Strong Towns, while here in Southern Indiana, it's Big Box Week every week of the year.

Big Box Week, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

... This all serves to illuminate the fact that big box development is extremely risky. We, the taxpayers, put a pipe in the ground in our name and we’ve made an eternal promise that generation after generation is expected to make good on. The big box retailer builds a store and they’ve recouped their capital costs in a decade. They are then free and clear to move on leaving us with a dead site.

Their zealous obligation is to their shareholders. I can respect that, but our obligation to our taxpayers – today’s and tomorrow’s – needs to be equally zealous.

This week we’re going to focus on big box stores. We’re going to look at their relatively low financial productivity combined with their high risk. We will examine sites that have failed and sites that have been reclaimed. We’ll delve a little into what is known as “sprawl retrofit” (their term, not mine) and take some time to look at the good and bad of urban big box stores. I also want to examine state subsidies for big box stores and how state governments have created – for their own financial benefit – a race to the bottom for municipalities.

CM Blair's bank, the State Street exurb, commercial dereliction, corporate welfare and non-transparency.

Lightning Food Mart is an excellent example of the durability of locally-owned independent small business.

Conversely, most of State Street between the hospital and I-265 long ago was given over to chains and franchises of varying stripes, with a handful of locally-owned businesses scattered randomly through the vicinity.

It's several blocks of exurban sprawl logic crammed inelegantly between neighborhoods where people actually live, with perpetually renewing auto-intensive development, traffic problems, more car-driven development and the ensuing hamster wheel of futility in trying to balance conflicting interests.

Meanwhile, on Sunday this posting racked up huge numbers.

Let's go Krogering?: Does CM Blair's fixation with a boarded-up Hardee's have to do with gas pumps and corporate welfare?

As pointed out to me subsequently, Kroger's ongoing machinations aren't the only reason to pretend that discussions of how to seize and demolish "derelict" commercial properties should occupy council time when other factors are involved.

From 2013 ...

First Savings Bank nearly finished with Wesley Commons project, by Kevin Eigelbach (Louisville Business First)

Clarksville-based First Savings Financial Group Inc., the holding company for First Savings Bank, has nearly finished developing a 4-acre retail center in New Albany. The bank held a grand opening for a new bank branch there, its first in New Albany, last month.

And this:

Tenants: A Bob Evans restaurant, a Tire Discounters store, a Visionworks eyewear store, a Qdoba Mexican Grill restaurant, Bella Nails manicurist, Fantastic Sam’s hair care, Woodside Dental Center, the First Savings branch and a Starbucks coffee shop with a drive-through lane.

Ooh, a drive-thru?

And this:

The bank’s total investment: $7.55 million.

As a friend notes, $7.55 million for all of Wesley Commons makes the $9 million for River Run seem even more inflated, but the point is transparency.

Granted, just because CM Blair is a banker, it doesn't mean he's to be vocationally vilified (even if the temptation always will be strong for me), but the fact that his bank is a player in the immediate vicinity, and Kroger's redevelopment designs were not clearly delineated by Blair or anyone else at last Thursday's council meeting (the razing of  the fire station at a loss to the city to suit Kroger on the other side of the plaza is a different but no less annoying topic), and the city council itself typically participates in decisions pertaining to zoning, traffic and land use on the State Street corridor -- look, all these factors demand more, not less, transparency from elected officials.

Although it does prove that "independent" means different things to different people ... and I like my definition better than his.

Is the end of Guitar Center the end of big box retail? We can only hope.

As my friend Clint noted when passing along this essay, "Longish and a bit wonky, but this section caught my eye."

Indeed. To be honest, I was unaware of Guitar Center's existence, although its probable demise provides a few important eulogy bullet points. Skipping straight to the conclusion ...

The End of Guitar Center, by Eric Garland

... Here’s what this really means: it’s the end of big box retail, an irrational addiction to growth, and the scourge of unregulated structured finance. For a few years, unwise urban planning and unregulated banks created a new bubble in the American suburbs. People bought homes they could not afford and turned their houses into lines of credit. This swindle eventually brought the economy to its knees and has taken most a decade to regain some state of uneasy equilibrium. Still, it was particularly stimulating to a certain type of retail that also depended on constant growth and financial trickery. The objective truth is that the growth of the last decade was financed by banking fraud, and that financial trickery of this sort only fools people in the short-term. Eventually, you must have a product people demand, sold by competent people who care about the business, financed in a way that makes sense.

Farewell to Red Lobster?

Gads, without Red Lobster and Olive Garden ... where would denizens of the exurb go for authentic seafood and Italian like momma used to make?

I'm telling you, it's a case for the ACLU.

Yawn.

Farewell Red Lobster: Owner to Sell or Spin Off Red Lobster, by Charisma Madarang (Foodbeast)

So long crab linguini soaking in alfredo sauce and lobster tails glistening in butter. Darden announced Thursday that it will either sell or spin off Red Lobster, in hopes of bolstering its stock value.

The company, which also runs Olive Garden and other restaurants, stated that it will also suspend the opening of new Olive Garden locations and slow down new locations for LongHorn Steakhouses.

Millions of zombie shoppers can't be wrong: Thanksgiving retailing and the intrusion of consumerism.

I'm unsure what can be done when the sheep willingly embrace the instruments of their prospective slaughter.

Protests mark Black Friday's creep into Thanksgiving (Al Jazeera)

Decision by large retailers to open on Thanksgiving has been attacked by those wanting a consumerism free day

... The decision by some retail giants to open on Thanksgiving has been greeted by alarm by those who resent the intrusion of consumerism on a day that traditionally has been about bringing family together. Workers planned petitions and protests around the country to coincide with early opening hours.

Walmart has been the biggest target for protests against holiday hours. Most of the company's stores are open 24 hours, but the retailer is starting its sales events at 6 p.m. on Thursday, two hours earlier than last year.

The issue is part of a broader campaign against the company's treatment of workers that's being waged by a union-backed group called OUR Walmart, which includes former and current workers. The group is staging demonstrations and walkouts at hundreds of stores around the country on Friday.

City to take Home Depot & Meijer to the woodshed, and with luck, their big boxed butts will be paddled mercilessly.

Of course, Business First gets all corporate-fluff tumescent on us and immediately shifts into full financial circle jerk mode, with "appeal" in the text being rendered as "fight" in the masthead, as though some great principle apart from persistent corporate greed were being discussed.

Yawn.

First we hand them the keys to the city treasury via handouts, abatements and other economic subsidies, then they try to wiggle out from their obligations.

Big-box retailers Home Depot and Meijer have appealed their assessed property tax values in New Albany.

Kunstler: "There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over."

Here's another commentary you'll not be reading at the "local" chain newspaper.

The Era of Giant Chain Stores Is Over -- And They've Ruined America, by James Howard Kunstler (Business Insider via Huff Post Small Business)

... The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry.

The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: People get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, Wal-Mart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them.

“The major policy recommendation from the report was that the city require an economic impact study [for large formula businesses].”

I have a recurring fantasy, in which each city council member must read an article like this one and provide a cogent summary in real English words without resorting to memes or crayons.

We all know who'd be up to the task, who'd skip class (redevelopment meetings, anyone?) and which household's dogs would be fed the homework along with the usual kibbles and bits.

But hey, what's another Wal-Mart among non-Democrat Democrats and exurban-envying Republicans?

How San Francisco is Dealing With Chains, by Stacy Mitchell (Institute for Local Self-Reliance)

No other large American city has done as much to check the spread of chain stores as San Francisco. Under a city law enacted in 2006, a “formula” retail store or restaurant cannot open in any of the city’s neighborhood commercial districts unless it undergoes a public hearing and obtains special approval from the Planning Commission.

The restrictions have helped San Francisco maintain a relatively vibrant independent retail sector. The city has twice as many independent bookstores per capita as New York. It is home to some 80 local hardware stores. It also boasts more than 900 independent retailers selling fresh food, including more than 50 locally owned grocery stores of at least 5,000 square feet.

But San Francisco’s policy has major gaps ...

"I think it's pretty bad .. we don't really need these chains."

I've never been to Totnes. Now I want to go. When I do, there'll be no Costa Coffee for me. If the people who live in Totnes have their way, there'll be no Costa Coffee, period. It's all about managing to elude the "stomping boot," isn't it?

Totnes: the town that declared war on global capitalism; The locals of the Devon resort have gone to war – with Costa Coffee. But why are they desperate to stop a branch of the giant chain opening up in town? And can they win?, by John Harris (Guardian)

 ... Welcome, then, to another chapter in the ongoing battle between places that pride themselves on their local character, and the great stomping boot of multinational capitalism.

One reason why the choice of River View retail tenants matters.

As noted yesterday ...

Are they protesting loudly?

Previously: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ... and Hauss Square.

PizzaGate: Just making a point about localization, Candidate Oakley. Nothing more, nothing less.

The photo was cribbed from Matt Oakley's 6th district candidate site on Facebook. We've brought PizzaGate to your attention precisely because Oakley once said that he makes decisions based on facts, and the fact is that buying local is a positive boost for the economy in Oakley's district, and city. A fervent discussion took place at my Facebook site. Jeff included a few prime links to AMIBA. Let's all think for a change, shall we?

Can you identify these pizza boxes?

It's hard to see the logo, and obviously I wouldn't have any way of knowing this, so help me: Are these pizza chain pizza boxes? Papa John's? Pizza Hut? Or maybe Bearno's? Tune in later today for the explanation and the whole photo.

Thinking "local," and ROTFLMAO.

I glanced at Think Local Southern Indiana's page at Facebook, and noticed a tout (from Think Local's very own page administrator) for networking:

Networking Opportunity: Connect Clarksville's September meeting will be at Chuy's, one of Clarksville's newest dining hot spots!

A quick web search revealed this January bit from Business First:

Chuy’s, a Texas-based restaurant chain that opened its first Louisville location last fall, already is expanding its local presence. The company is slated to open one of its Tex-Mex restaurants on the Clarksville side of Veterans Parkway in April, said Chuy’s marketing manager Hilary Delling.

Good work, One Southern Indiana! Your embarrassingly faux "buy local" group apparently has no clothes, either ... and your former honcho is bicycling to work.