MY husband and I recently stayed at a relative’s timeshare in New England. The mountain villa was in a town that has banned most franchises and chain stores, except for the supermarket, a couple of gas stations and a convenience store that is part of a regional chain. The town has a busy tourist economy, and it would presumably be highly attractive to chain stores. A woman who was visiting the local farmer’s market asked a vendor, “Is there a Dunkin’ Donuts around here?” The man said no, there was no Dunkin’ Donuts. “Oh,” she said, somewhat disappointed. “I do like their coffee.” Apparently, in the mind of this Philistine, it would be better for her to have her favorite coffee than for local entrepreneurs to run small businesses. She would rather see the ugly pink and orange Dunkin’ Donuts sign and smell the familiar aroma of cheap donuts with confetti than decipher the unfamiliar sign of a local coffee shop, of which there were several to choose from that had very good coffee.

There is no question in my mind that this town has saved itself from eventual decline. Not only is it much less ugly and depressing than nearby towns with chain stores but one has the sense that the people who live there identify with it as a community and feel some loyalty and pride. I say that based on my experiences simply talking and listening to the people who live there. So even if it allowed chains, but restricted their garish signs, the town would be worse off.

Instead of a Pizza Hut, there are individually-owned pizza restaurants and a couple of young entrepreneurs take a traveling wood-burning oven to the farmer’s market. People raise goats, sheep and chickens and sell the meat. There are a number of cheese makers who seem to do reasonably well and who sell things immeasurably superior to corporate cheese.

According to free market radicals, this town is engaging in practices that are fundamentally wrong. It is engaging in explicit protectionism in favor of small businesses. Or free market radicals will say that it’s okay to do this kind of thing here and there on a small scale, but the underlying principle of restricting commerce is immoral and tyrannical.

Now, of course, the people in this town can drive 20 or 30 minutes and find some of the big chains and benefit from their cheaper products. But let’s say, the entire state engaged in similar protectionism and explicitly favored businesses owned and started by those in the state and also limited the size of companies. No state in America would possibly do such a thing. None possess the will to do such a thing or the desire to withstand and suffer the negative consequences.

There would indeed be negative consequences to such protectionism. Consumers would not be able to have some things they wanted and, with certain products, they would spend significantly more. Also, consumers would inevitably try to buy things elsewhere, which would pose various ethical and legal dilemmas. All this is worth thinking about. But apparently we should not dream or even consider such things. According to free market radicals, those who consider such things are simply too stupid to understand the mystical workings of free enterprise and are really advocating Stalinist tyranny.

— Comments —

Nick writes:

It’s interesting, because the only place I know of with towns like that is New England, that bogeyman of the right and traditionalism.

I know that it was a pain for Dunkin’ Donuts to get into Sudbury, and to do so, they needed to create signage specifically for the purpose; signage that didn’t stand out like the proverbial sore thumb against the rest of the town. I think it’s wonderful, of course, as local and small is always better than global and big.

I lament that it seems to only be affluent towns taking such stands. More than once have I pondered specifically what the difference between Starbucks and the People’s Revolutionary Coffee Collective are. Big capitalism certainly excels at providing quantity, but quality is often lacking.

Many of my favorite haunts from childhood are now McDonald’s or what have you. How depressing.

Buck writes:

My dad was born in 1912, one year before the federal income tax, and the same year that F.W. Woolworth Company finally incorporated in one huge entity, merging all 596 stores. Woolworth invented the discount store and was the model for today’s “big box” stores and chains. They were the first to bring the merchandise out from behind the counter to liberate the buyer from the gate-keeping sales clerk. You used to have to know what you wanted before you went to the store. Now buyers got to see and touch everything, and began to buy items not on their list. That was hugely popular and successful. Woolworth may have created “the shopper.” But just like today, the scheme pits the developer and big money – who seized on the successful anchor store concept – against “mom and pop.” Woolworth, by-the-way, morphed into Foot Locker.

Woolworth’s evolution seems organic. How do you stop an economic scheme that engenders so much popular acceptance and financial success? Few people are astute futurists who will resist the host of economic benefits that creep in on and over us every day. The economic “American”, or more aptly, the U. S. citizen/non-citizen supplanted the historical American. Or, was that just a temporary wait in a canal lock, while the new economic engines cranked up and “raised all of our boats”? But, what exactly have we been raised above?

Attached is a bit of nostalgia; prices of common goods when I was nine years old. I, of course, had no idea what economics was, and prices were meaningless to me.

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