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Not just American. I either read, or listened to a Thinking Allowed episode, about chain cafes and restaurants and the meaning they had for different people in communities in London. Especially in regard to gentrification. I'm scraping this from the back of my memory, but I think the details were: Chains were generally seen as more welcoming, open, and inclusive to long-time locals and people with lower incomes. New independent places were seen as less welcoming as places "not for people like us."
I don't doubt that this is true of the vast majority of new openings in the last few years (with the usual honourable exceptions), especially considering how much starting capital you need to even rent a place nowadays. When London was still a lot emptier, buildings were often given away for free or next to nothing, e.g. by councils, just so they would get used.
itsbruce:
Sounds like they got their cause and effect the wrong way round. In London in the last couple of decades, a new independent cafe/restaurant mostly wasn't for "people like us" where us is the locals, because rising rates and austerity meant that the locals mostly couldn't afford to open a new business. And the incomers who could afford it were targetting "people like them". Self-reinforcing cycle. Doesn't mean locals would automatically be opposed to independent cafes/restaurants or the older ones in Brixton, for example, would never have gotten started.
Yes, while there have long been shopkeepers who live (far) away from their shops, there are still many who were/are 'part of the community' and who have stayed close by, in some cases because they own the building (and may be 'asset-rich, cash-poor').
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Oliver Schick
Not just American. I either read, or listened to a Thinking Allowed episode, about chain cafes and restaurants and the meaning they had for different people in communities in London. Especially in regard to gentrification. I'm scraping this from the back of my memory, but I think the details were: Chains were generally seen as more welcoming, open, and inclusive to long-time locals and people with lower incomes. New independent places were seen as less welcoming as places "not for people like us."