In the face of retail giants fueled by public policy often in their favor, pricey corporate marketing campaigns touting American-pie values and civic engagement, and state and federal laws allowing both tax loopholes and labor-law blindness, Mitchell’s anti-chain heroes are surprisingly small-scale. She describes chain expansions thwarted by diverse citizens groups who one activist in the book says “probably didn’t agree on anything else” but fighting their big-box development. These groups, through sheer will, eventually altered zoning laws, pressured area leaders to change policy, and sometimes filed expensive lawsuits. Independent businesses are also awakening to the threat of the big box, and are organizing buying and marketing co-ops with other similar businesses. Some municipal policymakers make attracting independent business a priority, as the town of Orono did in 1999 when it sent letters to 1200 Maine-licensed pharmacists to find someone to open a pharmacy to replace a fleeing Rite Aid. Ali Aghamoosa, who received his license from a Maine hospital, eventually opened Orono Pharmacy.
At the end of this deconstruction of, as Mitchell dubs it, “chain store world,” she calls on us to stop the big-box onslaught.
“There is nothing inevitable about the decline of locally owned businesses,” Mitchell writes. “Public policy and our own, often shortsighted, shopping choices have undermined their survival and propelled the proliferation of mega-retailers. But trends are not destiny. The future is open.”
As open, say, as a forgotten superstore.
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, Politics, Domestic Policy, Political Policy, Local Politics, Economic Issues, Poverty, Sam Walton, Stacy Mitchell, American Independent Business Alliance, Less 
