The Star was fervent, urging readers to support the mom-and-pops again only a month later: “Chain stores bring nothing to our village and it is the storekeepers who have an interest in East Hampton and its welfare that we want to patronize.”
Campaigns against chain stores continued in fits and starts for the entire 20th century, with elected officials taking various stabs at solutions (including town government offering “New Deal” financial relief to “locally owned businesses” during the Great Depression and zoning a few decades later to prevent 7-Eleven from setting up shop in East Hampton). While the main concern in 1916 was that chain supermarkets would knock out the greengrocer and the butcher (spoiler: supermarkets won), the worry by midcentury was that the mini-mall would kill Main Street. This is from 1962: “A warning that large shopping centers could develop in East Hampton Town and make ghost villages of the established business districts was given this week by Edward W. Hults, chairman of the Board of Assessors. ‘Unless a good, active planning board starts thinking about it and comes up with a careful development plan, we could have a serious problem.’ ”
As prescient as our forefathers were, no one seems to have predicted what the real murderer of our Main Street small businesses would be: “luxury blight,” to borrow a phrase coined by East, The Star’s summer magazine, in 2019. While Mr. Boughton and Mr. Hults were proven completely correct in their anxieties, the chain stores that have signaled the final death knell were not McDonald’s and Forever 21 but the international designer-goods retailers, chain stores of a higher (or at least more expensive) order.
This week, a petition is circulating online: “Protect Sag Harbor’s Main Street! Don’t Let It Become ‘Chain Street.’ ” It had more than 500 signatures at press time and, using words that echo similar lamentations from the previous century, reads: “The unchecked proliferation of formulaic stores and restaurants — businesses that can be found in dozens of other towns and shopping malls anywhere — poses an existential threat to Sag Harbor’s distinctive identity and economic vitality. . . . We, the residents, property owners, visitors, and concerned citizens of Sag Harbor, urge the mayor and Village Board of Trustees to enact legislation that prohibits or significantly limits the number of chain retailers or food service establishments permitted to operate within the Village Business and Office districts.”
We agree wholeheartedly with the organizers of this petition and wish them full success in getting the worthies of Sag Harbor to define the terms “formula retail” and “chain establishment” as an essential step in halting the progress of deluxe-chain-store homogenization. Sag Harbor does need to be saved.
Still, we’d also like to point out that the main force behind “luxury blight” is the pernicious cycle of skyrocketing rent. The value of property and presence on the Main Streets of the South Fork has made it so that the only businesses that can make rent are global conglomerates (seeking a storefront mainly as a marketing ploy). We know this by now.
The reason Sag Harbor has maintained its uniqueness and charm is because a larger proportion of the buildings remain owner-operated, but they are sadly falling fast. What is really needed to protect Sag Harbor’s Main Street, and to return East Hampton’s and Southampton’s to even a shadow of their former glory, are billionaire angels who will (in the model articulated by the Anchor Society and as seen in semi-practice at the Sagaponack General Store) buy up buildings and lease them at benevolent rates — as a cause, in the name of cultural preservation — to the mom-and-pop shops that we, as a society, cannot afford to lose: the butcher, the baker, the cobbler, the bookseller, and the homespun boutique.
Zoning changes restricting retail footprints and definitions of terms are needed and worthy, but they alone won’t save Main Street because the pressure to profit is simply too intense.