We love to entice all of these out of state stores, resturants to Fargo only for all their profits to be funneled to their shareholders. Yes they pay property taxes and have employees but their profits all go to bentonville or mpls or anywhere but in the City.

Locally owned business money stays in the community and more importanly these buisness owners have a stake in the community. Do you remember when apple bees had that big cancer fund raiser (that's right its the HoDo who does). Remember when CVS paid a big chunk for the new southside library (whoops I guess that was the Pracs founder), remember when Alien Technologies bought and donated the downtown building to NDSU (oh yeah that was Bergum who did that).

My point is that our locally owned business owner's live here, their kids go to school here, and they care more about Fargo then does some public traded company, yet we do very little to support locally owned businesses.

We will spend millions upgrading and interchange and building up 52 ave for Walmart, why not roll out the red carpet for our locally owned.

Let's start a Buy Local program like Austin Texas. Let's do a study to calculate the benefits of locally owned businesses.

Check this out of the library - big box swindle by stacy mitchell
http://www.bigboxswindle.com/