You know when politics doesn’t work. You can see it as a war zone.
Ten years ago Home Depot wanted to open a store in San Francisco in the middle of the home remodeling district. Home Depot already had a store in South San Francisco, which drew $40 million in business from San Francisco.
The neighbors successfully fought off Home Depot and have
continued to fight it off ever since. The neighbors argued that it would create traffic, congestion, bad air,
and hurt other hardware stores. It is a
bad neighborhood to start with and every other hardware store has to deal with
the realities of business; some will benefit others won’t.
The next battle will be a week from today and Home Depot has a chance because the only home remodeling store in the area closed (Goodman’s Lumber) five years ago and the city has had a wasteland ever since.
The neighboring businesses (mostly in the home remodeling
field) have suffered terribly from the absence of Home Depot and they have
slowly gotten into the political process and learned how to fight. They have also repainted their stores and signs in anticipation of the neighbors arguing that the decline in sales is self inflicted.
Five years with a very unpleasant hardware store (Goodman's) that wanted to go out of business and five years of wasteland. Politics is not a pretty picture. People talk about human morals not keeping up with scientific change. Political processes can’t keep up with commerce.