A recent note in The Parkville Luminary indicated that a Pizza Hut "facility" will be opeing soon in Parkville Commons.  Parkville's good fortune at having a friend like Pepsico (the corporate owner of Pizza Hut) could soar higher only under certain circumstances.  A Wal Mart?  A prison?  Another personality-free subdivision?  Bird flu? 

I'll concede that there is nothing intrinsically evil about Pizza Hut. However, I believe this is a situation in which an unfair advantage is being gained by a non-local corporate chain.

Parkville Commons was built through the combined efforts of its developer (River North Development LLC) and government entities (primarily the City of Parkville). Portions of the property were aggregated through the use of eminent domain (expropriation of private property without the owner's consent, sometimes delegated to a third party, in this case the developer). Then, the roads around Parkville Commons were enhanced by funds generated through tax increment financing (TIF). Accessibility to the businesses at Parkville Commons has been underwritten by a portion of the sales taxes generated by those establishments. This tax set-aside carries on for more than twenty years. Most other Parkville businesses don't share these sorts of advantages.

So, in other words, national retail and dining chains come into a town, open up shop in a new development, and steal market share from established, locally-owned businesses on a non-level playing field. As such, they're strip-mining the wealth of the local community, extracting profit for the benefit of remote executives and shareholders, and effectively being given incentives by the local governments to do so.

Locally-owned retailers return triple the proportion of their income to the local community compared to the chains. It is inherently unfair for a large business to be given a subsidy while a long-established, locally-based competitor is left without. It is too easy to lose sight of the connection between the welfare of our hometown businesspeople and that of the entire community.

There is some indication that, to a point, a dollar in the pocket of Pepsico isn't necessarily a dollar out of the pocket of a local businessperson. But the dining-out market only has so much elasticity. At some point, the chain and the local business do start to compete for the finite budget of that market. Before we reach that point, we really do need to think about the situation. We have the option of limiting our participation in this fiscal shell game. We can keep in mind which homegrown businesses (our real friends) were first to adopt us when things weren't so great, such as after the 1993 flood. We can choose to support those who supported us when things were not looking good, and refrain from the appeasement of our fair-weather friends, the national corporations.