The upside to having local business owners on the city council (or with their minions, who could be “assigned” to run for office) is that they have a vested personal interest in good city government — they are also the basis for the “machine” that we are familiar with (Tammany Hall, anyone?) — benevolent dictators to some extent, but there was a certain floor to the level of services provided to keep people voting for them.

Chain stores present an opening for the disconnect between city government and absentee owners; they don’t bother with local councils because there are just too many of them, and — as Gordon said — managers don’t really care. Even if they live locally, they most likely were recruited from elsewhere, and will go somewhere else when their stores are closed. (Yes, there are exceptions; I know some of them.)

Neo is correct that the ideology of the “pool” of candidates for city councils, and the inclination of the voters, is the most important factor in electing local governments.

However, as I’ve seen many other people remark over the years — for some reason (!), leftists have more time (and interest) in staffing positions where they can meddle in other people’s lives and exert control and power (anyone here live in an HOA? Case closed.)
As Gordon said, “serious people have serious jobs and no patience for meeting with the bike lane mafia” – which is what happens as cities grow and the leftist tilt of all large urban populations takes hold.

David sums that up nicely.

Note the relationship of commercial central planning to social & government central planning (and I would add non-profits, such as BSA & colleges, especially large state-wide systems): the people making the decisions have no “skin in the game” local to the effects of their decisions; all of their “consequences” are located in the nexus of other central planners (“Am I still in the club?”) — hence, the DC & corporate “bubbles” and the lack of accountability at upper levels for decisions that — as we have seen recently — end up killing businesses, cities, and individual people.

You can also see this in the spate of virtue-signalling corporate sign-ons to the mafias of today, with no regard to the actual sentiments of their customers — and thus we see different responses to said boilerplate in different areas of the country.

I think that’s a worthwhile point. True, there are GOP-run cities that have the same mix of chain stores (and factories which are controlled from somewhere else), but over time, a de-skilling of local management….which will be accelerated by the current vogue for ‘big data’ and further emphasis on ‘push’ inventory systems where all restocking decisions are made centrally…will lead to a reduction in the number of well-connected and well-paid people who can actually get something done locally.

Except for the lawyers, and, in some places, the senior academics.

What do chain stores have to do with the far leftists on the city council who are voting for the things that are making the city unliveable? Plenty of GOP-run cities have lots of chain stores, but those cities don’t have far leftists in charge of the council and the mayorship, and they are doing okay.

What is killing the large towns and cities is chain stores. Once up on a time Minneapolis was run by people named Dayton and Pillsbury. They were part time council members, because they had businesses to run. They minded the budget and made sure the potholes got filled. But store managers don’t care about budgets or potholes.

Nowadays even the hardware stores are a chain, managed out of a building in the suburbs. We’re down to two independent full-service grocery stores; the third was bought out for the site by a chain. Chain gas stations can undercut an independent by underpricing on gas. They can afford to lose money on gas sales for a while. Independents cannot.

A restaurant build out costs at least $500,000 now. A chain can finance that. A new guy starting out? No way.

And if you look at the ruins in Minneapolis, it’s very clear. Walgreens stores were cleared to the pad very early, and they set up portable pharmacies. At least 3 of the five looted stores will never reopen as full service stores. The theft is just too high. They’ll set up drive thru pharmacies.

But stores like Uncle Hugo’s, the oldest independent SF bookstore in the country, can’t get a permit to clean up. Might be asbestos there, that means triple the cost. The next door dental office’s contractor knocked down salvagable walls and dumped their debris into Uncle Hugo’s. There’s a big dump fee savings if you do that!

No one on the Minneapolis city council ever met a payroll or worked in a productive job. They’re all activists and political pros. Why would a business owner want to do that? Yeah, the pay is decent since they made it full-time, but serious people have serious jobs and no patience for meeting with the bike lane mafia.

Chain stores are a cancer on the civic body. I didn’t used to think so. I was wrong.

(One can, sigh, imagine the deep disappointment….)

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/desire-fit-root-almost-all-wrongdoing/

https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/uschinastrong-biden/

But will this news change anyone’s mind?
Or this?

https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/cuomo-adviser-ccp-foreign-agent/

Daniel Kohns, who also served as Communications Director for Democratic Congressman Mike Honda, leveraged these connections to become Vice President at lobbying behemoth BLJ Worldwide.

In 2018, he was required to file with the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a result of him lobbying on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, specifically the country’s U.S. Embassy.
…
In addition to Cuomo bungling New York’s COVID-19 response by sending infected patients into nursing homes, the New York Governor bizarrely called the virus the “European Virus,” proceeding to insist it “did not come from China, it came from Europe” in an April press conference.

This unearthed connection follows National Pulse exclusive reporting highlighting the revolving door between former advisors and high-level employees of Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post, and the Obama and Biden administration using their taxpayer-funded credentials to lobby for companies directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party and its military.