After more than four years of fighting to block three big box retailers, the town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, has adopted an ordinance banning stores...
A grassroots group, Citizens Organized for Responsible Development (CORD), in Ellsworth, Maine, has gathered the 1,109 signatures needed to place a measure calling for a...
A profile of the first Independent Business Alliance. Plotting the overthrow of the franchised world, bookstore owner David Bolduc and political organizer Jeff Milchen strategize...
In mid-May, the city council of Arcata, California voted 4-to-1 to enact a citywide cap on the number formula restaurants. The measure must pass a...
Six weeks after an advisory referendum won broad support from residents, the Ocean Beach, California, planning board voted 8-to-4 in early May to recommend that...
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown vetoed an ordinance to require greater scrutiny of big box development. The measure passed the Board of Supervisors on a...
Steve Bercu, owner of Book People, a large independent bookstore in Austin, Texas, has been increasingly concerned about the decline of the city’s homegrown businesses....
To counter competition from big box retailers, independent lighting stores are banding together in a cooperative called Lighting One. The coop enables members to reduce...
Just a few years ago, industry observers were predicting the demise of independent funeral homes. Four giant companies were buying up thousands of independent mortuaries...
The now defunct Intimate Bookshop of North Carolina has filed suit against Barnes & Noble and Borders Books alleging that the chains used their market...
A coalition of neighborhood, small business, and environmental groups has gathered more than 4,000 petition signatures against a proposed Wal-Mart store in Vancouver, Canada. …...
Rumors of a citizens lawsuit are beginning to circulate in New Orleans less than a month after the city council approved a 200,000 square foot...
Voters in five California cities—Agoura Hills, Mountain View, Reedley, Calexico, and East Palo Alto—went to the polls Tuesday to consider measures on big box development....
In late January, after more than two hours of mostly favorable public testimony, the Board of Commissioners in Hood River County, Oregon voted unanimously to...
The Bozeman, Montana city commission is expected to vote later this month on a zoning ordinance that would require proposals for stores larger than 50,000...