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BS ‘n’ About…
Franchise Reform
The greatest threat we face to the diversity of human culture is the franchise. Rio is starting to look like Paris which is starting to look like Hong Kong. New York is starting to look like Chicago which is starting to look like… Peoria! Everywhere is starting to look the same.
We can now buy New York style hot dogs in California, Chicago style pizza in Florida, and Kentucky Fried Chicken everywhere. Just because we can build a Starbucks on every street corner in the world doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. As we walk through the neighborhoods of our lives we should be focusing, not on what is there, but on what is no longer there.
Gone are the locally owned family eateries that had been serving their neighbors with pride for generations. Gone are the auto repair shops where the buck stopped with your son’s little league coach. Gone is the myriad of unique businesses with your neighbors’ names above the doors. Gone are the days when the dollars you spent stayed in your community.
Franchising is such a dynamic, profitable business model that the insidiousness of its effect on human culture will be easy to overlook until it is too late. Unfortunately, it is already too late. Just ask any of the unfortunate automatons who don a Mickey D’s clown suit so that you can ‘have it your way’. Just ask your son’s little league coach. The walking neighborhoods of Main Street America have been replaced with the drive-up windows of an impersonal strip mall culture: “May I take your order?”
Man is a communal animal. Since the dawn of time the tribe, the village, the neighborhood, was the canvas upon which we painted our lives. We took pride in the uniqueness of our communities. We fought for our communities. Most of us lived, worked, and died in our communities. It was how we defined ourselves in relation to the rest of the big, bad, scary world. It was where we felt safe.
This has been taken away from us. We no longer know what’s in the hamburger we’re being served nor what part of China our baby’s crib was assembled in. We no longer know who owns the restaurants, stores, or service businesses we patronize. Those standing across the counter from us commute from across town. We do know that about seventy-five cents of every dollar we spend finds its way to Washington or Wall Street. Not much of it finds its way back.
Franchising affects everything! It is destroying our neighborhoods, our satisfaction with our work, and the fair and equitable flow of money throughout our economy. A dollar spent at a locally owned restaurant might get spent buying vegetables from a local farmer who fertilized his field with fertilizer bought at the local hardware store. A dollar spent at the local burger franchise will go to support illegal immigrants working at some big meat processing conglomerate a thousand miles away that feeds its cows from a Fortune 500 agribusiness that buys its feed from somewhere in the Third World. This doesn’t even take into account the lost local advertising, accounting, legal and other support services for that restaurant. Every dollar spent at a non-locally owned franchise doesn’t take one dollar out of the local economy, it takes five to ten!
Franchising is the single biggest reason that our lifetime has seen the destruction of Main Street and the rise of the Wall Street Potentates. Where do you think they got the money to hand out half billion dollar bonuses? From the seventy five cents of every dollar we spend that flows through their greedy little fingers, that’s where.
Yet those same greedy little fingers have seen to it that their neighborhoods, the Palm Beaches and Palm Springs of our world, aren’t littered with neon clowns and golden arches. And therein lies the solution.
Unlike most of the problems we face, this is one we can deal with personally on a local basis. A few well thought out town ordinances and it is very difficult for franchises to proliferate. For years the citizens of San Francisco have banded together to fight virtually every franchise that tries to invade their neighborhoods. As a result, family businesses abound there and the city still has a unique identity, an old-fashioned Main Street feel about it.
Let your ordinances start with signage, uniforms, and the other physical ugliness that comes with franchise culture. Then pass some more encouraging, if not forcing, the use of local vendors and services. Draw up some strict guidelines about non-local, non-vested ownership. Make it hard and expensive to do business and new ones won’t come. Wean yourself off of them and the old ones will go away. It works in Palm Beach and Palm Springs. It will work in your town too.
Franchising is too dynamic a business model to ever hope to do away with it altogether. Much of its power lie in the co-oping of services and bulk purchase of supplies. We need to find a way of transferring these business efficiencies to mom-and-pop enterprises. Co-op the advertising and sell the bulk-purchased hamburger to Mom, then let her prepare it in her own unique way.
Franchising is good for business but it is bad for human beings. If we allow it to proliferate unchecked, culture will be something we visit in a museum. Once we all start wearing the same clothes, eating the same foods, buying the same ‘stuff’, there will be no going back. Once we have erased the diversity of human culture from our planet it will be gone forever. We will have lost all continuity with our history and our past. We will mistake the destruction of all we have built for millennia with progress. We will doom ourselves to never learning from our mistakes.
This one starts with you, a petition, and your local town council. This one is the answer to “What can I do?”
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