I Said “Son, Take A Good Look Around”
By Mitch Berg
After fighting against a full-court regulatory press by the City of Saint Paul for months and months, yet another entrepreneur – from that hive of business-friendliness, MInne-freaking-apolis – has opted to cut his losses.
Joe Doakes writes:
The City fought them long enough, they gave up and went away. Thank Thune we kept that Bad business off Grand Avenue. Now there’s room for a Good business, something that sells hand-dipped candles, maybe. Or maybe mystic crystals and wind chimes. To pedestrians or bicyclists.
Joe has too much faith. In most parts of St. Paul, it’d be some kind of city-funded non-profit. But on Grand Avenue, it’ll be a chain. No, not a plebeian chain like Chipotle; not a local chain like Pineda. No, it’ll be some national, fashionably-PC, high-end place like Patagonia, with the self-righteous cachet to overcome most of the objections and the money to beat the rest.
That’s what this City needs more of, good businesses like that.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Hey, we can take our train to Minneapolis for cupcakes!
In a couple of years.
July 13th, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Notoriously anti-business St. Paul is nationally famous for another thing… Knuckling under to the Civil Rights lynch mob when it comes to dubious “Disparate Impact” lawsuits. Aww, looky here – Wells Fargo just settled a suit because 3rd party referrers might not have/didn’t always/seldom/never offered minorities/affected group members better terms on home loans (the language is used due to the fact that no one had to prove anything in court, the mere use of statistics (which can’t be challenged) is all it takes. Because Mayor Coleman has a low threshold for the pain of arm twisting from DC (even though we all know no one in St Paul would ever discriminate and the city had the best test case to do away with the noxious complaints), businesses every where continue to take the hammer.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303740704577523182666590806.html?mod=googlenews_wsj