Friday, December 09, 2005

N.Y. town seeks to define 'chain'

By Jeremiah Horrigan
Times Herald-Record
jhorrigan@th-record.com

New Paltz, N.Y. - It's no secret that the Village Board wants to keep New Paltz unchained by large, out-of-town corporate businesses.

But what exactly is a chain? Is a chain composed only of hundreds of links or just a handful? And what if that handful is owned not by some faraway corporate group but a guy just down the road?

Those are the sort of questions Mayor Jason West says the Village Board is researching in light of the expected arrival of Blockheads, a Mexican restaurant that hopes to open its doors in the spring in the space now occupied by Ariel Booksellers.

West's antipathy toward corporate chains is well-known; his refusal to so much as set foot in the Starbucks outpost on Main Street is seen as a badge of honor by his fellow Greens. "Chains and, to a lesser extent, franchises have advantages that puts them above and beyond local market forces - they have price supports, bulk buying, tax supports that independent shopkeepers don't have," he said.

The effort behind the board's research, he said, is to "protect the independent character of the village" so that it doesn't look like every other college town.

But while everyone acknowledges that McDonald's or Starbucks are corporate chains, what about Blockheads, which has five smaller restaurants in Manhattan and is co-owned by Ken Sofer, a resident of West Park?

"I've got mixed feelings," West said, acknowledging that other village businesses - such as the Art & Soul tattoo parlor - have more than one location.

If it's numbers West is talking, Sofer pleads guilty to being a chain. But he thinks there's more to the question than numbers.

"I think you can tell intuitively what a chain is - it's very formulaic; everybody's working from the same playbook," he said.

"That's not us. Each restaurant has its own chef, its own management."

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