Hometown Peninsula Independent Business Alliance is a non-profit organization representing locally-owned businesses on the San Francisco Peninsula. Our goal is to shift community culture to support the core of independent businesses that help keep the Peninsula unique and the local economy sustainable. 

Organization History In the late summer of 2005, Kepler’s, a fifty-year-old independent bookstore in Menlo Park, California, abruptly shut down. Owner Clark Kepler explained that bookstore chains and Amazon.com had displaced so much of the store’s sales that he could no longer pay the bills. But before Kepler could file for bankruptcy, the business was swept up in an outpouring of community grief. Hundreds of local residents rallied outside the shuttered store, which was soon covered in forlorn love letters from customers describing how the bookstore had been the center of community life and what a loss it was. “Can’t the store be saved? You’re one of the main reasons I’m here.” Many offered money: “How about a monthly donation? I can do $50/mo… Give us a Web site so we can all support you. Let us help. Please.” Soon someone set up SaveKeplers.com and the pledges poured in. Five weeks after it had closed, Kepler’s was back, saved by a group of local investors who vowed to return the business to sound financial footing, and numerous small donations from residents.

Once of the more remarkable aspects of this community effort to save a bookstore is that many of the people who rallied – who so adored this business that they could not conceive of their town without it and were willing to give their time and even their money to save it – confessed in interviews with reporters covering the story that they, too, had been buying more and more books online and at Target and Borders. They loved the store for its many author events and for the joy of browsing and meeting neighbors, and for the sense of community it fostered, but that devotion did not always translate into regular patronage. The store’s near closure brought into stark relief just what was at stake.

Across the country, people are coming to similar realizations about the value of locally owned, independent businesses – the beloved bookstores, century-old family hardware stores, local grocers, and funky neighborhood record stores – as well as the high cost to communities and local economies of the corporate retailers that have grown to dominate so much of our landscape… Independent Business Alliances have sprung up in more than three dozen communities since the late 1990s and, through creative marketing and educational campaigns, are making “locally owned” something residents are increasingly seeking and supporting… This explosion of activity may well herald the beginning of a sea change in our priorities as a society.

The above excerpted from Big-Box Swindle by Stacey Mitchell (Beacon Press 2006)

In the spring of 2007, Clark Kepler, along with other independent business owners, formed an independent business alliance called Hometown Peninsula. Its mission is to keep peninsula hometowns alive and thriving by encouraging residents to buy from locally owned, independent businesses. Membership to Hometown Peninsula is open to local independent businesses that have a primary place of business on the peninsula and whose owners have a full-decision-making authority for their business. Individuals who support the goals of Hometown Peninsula may become supporting members.

The Problem Communities increasingly are losing their ability to determine their character and future, largely due to increased control by outside corporate influence resulting from a lack of proactive planning by local governments, the economic and political power of corporate chains, and minimal public awareness of the benefits independent businesses bring to the community.  Local governments often are wooed easily into providing tax breaks to absentee-owned corporations, and deals made with developers leave local views and needs out of the conversationundefinedas long as zoning needs are met.  Corporate chains have the advantages of economies of scale, large advertising budgets, and can sustain a financial loss during economic downturn that community-based businesses do not have or cannot sustain.  The ramifications of the loss of community self-determination are interwoven and far-reaching and include consequences to the social fabric, environmental sustainability and well-being, freedom of expression and the arts, and democracy.

Organizational Activity Hometown Peninsula works to attain some of the advantages enjoyed by national chain corporations for community-based independent businesses through facilitating group purchasing and advertising to achieve economies of scale, providing a “brand” for local independent businesses, raising public awareness, facilitating intra-organizational mentoring, and local advocacy.

The Problem HTP Addresses Our communities increasingly are losing their ability to determine their character and future, largely due to increased control by outside corporate influence resulting from a lack of proactive planning and minimal public awareness.  Both residents and local governments often have their hands tied by developers who are more motivated by profit than contributing to community well-being.  In addition, local governments have been wooed into providing tax breaks or subsidies to corporations promising increased employment opportunities and sales tax revenues in exchange for locating in a particular community (or threatening to provide them to another nearby location if a community blocks the effort).  The ramifications of this loss of self-determination are interwoven, and include:

Social Consequences:  While many community residents perceive they will gain choices when a new big box or chain moves in, their choices actually diminish in some important ways.  We know the corporation provides products found anywhere there is an outletundefinedperhaps in a neighboring community, and certainly at one if its direct corporate competitors.  However, when a big box comes to town, 16 percent of its revenue draws from new sales or from neighboring communities, while 84 percent of its sales are taken directly from existing area businesses. (Stone [1995] Competing with the Discount Mass Merchandisers, Iowa State University). A single big box store can cause the demise of as many as 36 of our friends’ and neighbors’ local businesses (S. Mitchell, Senior Researcher, New Rules Project).

Community history also is at risk.  Several years ago the major drugstore chains---CVS, Walgreen’s, Rite Aid, and Eckerd---lost interest in strip malls and began to focus expansion plans on prominent downtown intersections. Often these intersections are occupied by some of the community's oldest and most significant buildings. Rather than reuse these structures, chain drugstore corporations have bulldozed numerous downtown blocks to make way for their outlets to maintain their formula. For example, an ornate 1906 Beaux Arts-style building in De Kalb, Illinois was demolished for a Walgreen’s, a 200-year-old inn in Whitpain, Pennsylvania was razed for a CVS, an historic depot in Tarboro, North Carolina was torn down while citizens groups were amid negotiations with Eckerd over its fate, and in Brownsburg, Indiana, CVS corporation demolished an entire block of historic buildings on a corner of the town's busiest intersection. One year later, Walgreen’s corporation leveled the opposite block.