Keeping it local

Every time I pass the Panda Express they’re building on Kirkwood, I pause briefly and sigh. Sometimes I look for spare tools on the ground, hoping that there’s some handiwork I can do to speed its completion. We have one back where I live in Illinois, and I have fond high-school memories of dining on Kung Pao and Dr. Pepper. Someday, Bloomington will know my joy, but that moment isn’t coming quickly enough.\nAnd yet all I can hear from people lately is how Kirkwood is getting so commercialized. They’re building a Dunkin’ Donuts right near the Sample Gates, and there’s already a Starbucks around the corner on Indiana Avenue. If you read magazines like “Bloom” and listen to our fair town’s plentiful cast of insufferable hippies who decry globalization, you might walk away thinking that these things infringe on Bloomington’s essential nature and somehow harm our community. But this isn’t true in the slightest.\nFranchises of larger corporations, like Starbucks, do much of the same things that supposedly “local” businesses do. They hire local people to work there, they provide services to the town and they pay taxes. The only difference is where the residual profit goes. And while Starbucks sends a cut back to its headquarters in Seattle, local buisnesses keep the profit with an owner who lives in Bloomington. But that doesn’t help the community. Does this owner buy imported beer? Furniture from Virginia? DVDs from Hollywood? Does he buy his coffee from international growers?\nProbably. Bloomington doesn’t make all those things, and no business owner would be so stupid as to spend all his money in town, since it’s likely more expensive. This business owner compels people to buy his local products, but he buys his input goods as well as his personal luxuries from other towns. That doesn’t help anyone.\nMeanwhile, the only reason supposedly “local” businesses try to encourage people to patronize them are because their prices are higher, and they can’t compete on purely economic terms. So when people buy a cup of coffee from a more expensive local store, they leave with less money than if they had bought a comparatively cheaper cup at a place like Starbucks. Local businesses can actually make the people of that town poorer. Places like Wal-Mart are an even better example. When some of a town’s residents have very little income, buying household essentials for the lowest possible price can help a community in need.\nBut what strikes me most about this prejudice against franchise stores is the insistence that people in the community shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions for themselves. It’s a sad idea that what makes our town special is the type of stores we line our streets with, and not our artistic community, parks or architecture. \nIf Kirkwood is getting too commercial, it’s because people see in their purchases a statement of their character, and see in their receipts a validation that they’re saving the town, one overpriced transaction at a time. Meanwhile, in a few months time when I dine on General Tso’s chicken at Panda Express, I will not taste guilt in the slightest.