Fighting McWorld: The cities that banned global chains.

Somewhere between the 20th century and tomorrow, our cities began to vanish, not in the apocalyptic sense with wrecking balls and fire but in a quieter, more insidious way. One by one, the crooked bookshops, the family-run bakeries, the cobblers who knew your name, the cafés with mismatched chairs and a cat asleep on the windowsill unobtrusively evaporated, and in their place rose a gleaming, climate-controlled monoculture, predictably, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, a Subway wedged between them in a global architectural sandwich, the same couches, the same font, the same faintly chemical smell of uniformity piped through identical ventilation systems in a dozen time zones. This phenomenon has a name, which many call “McWorld”, coined by American political scientist Benjamin R. Barber in his landmark 1992 Atlantic Monthly essay and later expanded into a 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld. The term describes the relentless homogenising force of global capitalism, the way multinational corporations flatten cultural distinctiveness into a smooth, frictionless surface of consumption. Barber identified four driving forces behind it: a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. Together, they’ve woven the world into an intricate tapestry of trade and commerce, yet not everyone is willing to don this new garment. In many cities, towns, and islands around the world, communities have taken a stand not only in terms of culture but also through legal action, implementing outright bans on certain businesses. In contrast, others have introduced "formula business ordinances," which suggests that these efforts are a shared belief that a sense of place is important. Residents argue that the street where they live should not be indistinguishable from every other street and that preserving local identity is worth protecting through legislation.

Carmel-By-The-Sea: The Pioneer

Few places make the case for resistance as visually persuasively as Carmel-by-the-Sea, a coastal California town of approximately 3,800 people squeezed into one square mile (some resources claim 1.1 square miles, too) of Pacific coastline south of Monterey. As early as the 1960s, residents were growing uneasy about the encroachment of commercial interests on the town's character. In the early 1970s, a moratorium on new restaurant construction gave the city time to develop a more permanent framework. By the mid-1980s, Carmel's General Plan was in effect, and with it came an official ordinance stating that "no drive-in, fast food, or formula food establishments are permitted" within city limits. It became the first city in the United States to enact a formula restaurant ban. The city code frames the rationale clearly: these restrictions exist "to preserve Carmel's character as a residential village and perpetuate a balance of land uses that are compatible with local resources and the environment." The practical result is a culinary landscape where every restaurant is locally owned, menus change with the seasons, and the town now boasts more restaurants per capita than any other small municipality in the United States. Local businesses thrive, unemployment remains low, and small-business ownership rates are among the highest in California.

The ban has not been without friction. A now-famous episode in the 1980s saw a shoe merchant attempt to open an ice cream parlour, falling foul of the new takeout restrictions. Media coverage inflamed the story into a national controversy, briefly casting Carmel as a regulatory dystopia. The backlash was dramatic enough that actor Clint Eastwood, who owned a restaurant in town, successfully ran for mayor in 1986, partly on a platform of loosening restrictions. During his two-year tenure, he lifted the ice cream prohibition. But the broader ordinance stayed, a testament to how deeply the community had internalised its own identity politics. The trade-off is real, however. Without the price-compressing power of chain economies of scale, goods in Carmel are expensive. The median home sale price sits at $2.5 - 3 million. The charm the ordinance protects is accessible primarily to the wealthy. The people who work in those artisanal restaurants often commute from neighbouring towns, where they can actually afford to live. Critics argue that the term "local character" can sometimes serve as a cover for exclusivity. It’s easy to reject chain restaurants like burger joints when the clientele can afford to choose independent alternatives.

New England’s Long Reach

Carmel's example has not gone unnoticed. By the early 2000s, a growing number of communities, overwhelmingly in tourist-reliant or college-town settings, were passing their own versions of the formula business restriction. In Maine, the seaside village of Ogunquit held a public referendum in 2006 in which 72 percent of voters approved an ordinance banning chain restaurants outright, triggered by rumours that a Dunkin' Donuts was eyeing a site in town. The ordinance defines a formula restaurant as any establishment sharing a name, uniform, colour scheme, architectural design, or signage with another restaurant, regardless of ownership. Neighbouring York followed with a similar measure, cementing what was becoming a recognisable pattern: a local catalyst (usually a specific chain announcing plans), a community response, and a legal ordinance. In Rhode Island, Bristol passed a formula business ordinance barring businesses of more than 2,500 square feet or more than 65 feet of street frontage from its historic downtown.

Healdsburg, a small wine-country city in Northern California, adopted an even more aggressive posture. A chain ban had already existed along the city's central plaza, described by Mayor Evelyn Mitchell as "Healdsburg's living room," but in a unanimous vote, the city council extended the restriction to a larger portion of downtown and went further by banning big-box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot from the town entirely. For Healdsburg, the willingness to forgo certain sales tax revenues was a deliberate choice to protect commercial identity. Calistoga, also in Napa Valley, had taken a similarly firm stance a year earlier. A 1995 ordinance outright banned chain restaurants and hotels while requiring permits for other chains, driven by a desire to protect local businesses and the town's uniqueness as a wine-tourism destination. Decades later, the town's historic downtown remains a mix of wine-tasting rooms, high-end independent restaurants, and local boutiques.

The Jersey Francisco Equation

Chain-store restrictions are found not only in charming small towns but also in urban centers, and thus experience similar challenges, especially as gentrification attracts new investments and corporate retail. In May 2015, the Jersey City Council passed an amendment to the city's development code that, in effect, banned most chains from newly redeveloped areas of the city. The measure restricted retailers and restaurants with multiple locations exhibiting standardised characteristics, logos, décor, and menus from occupying ground-floor commercial space in certain downtown zones, while permitting chains to occupy a maximum of 30 percent of such space overall. Pharmacy giant CVS threatened to sue the city when it was denied the right to open a new branch under the new rules. But residents and businesses largely supported the restrictions. For Ariel Zaurov, who owns two independent pharmacies in the neighbourhood, the ordinance was existential. San Francisco has taken a softer but still consequential approach since 2004, requiring any chain with more than 11 locations to go through a conditional-use permit process before opening in certain neighbourhoods. While most applications are ultimately approved, the process itself functions as a deterrent. A 2014 study found that only 12 percent of stores in San Francisco are chains, compared with 32 percent nationally, a significant divergence attributable, at least in part, to the friction the permit process creates.

Bermuda Against the Tide

Some of the most complete forms of resistance are rooted not in zoning law but in national legislation and cultural assertion. Bermuda enacted its Prohibited Restaurants Act in 1977, prohibiting international restaurant chains from operating on the island at all. The law has an exception for chains located inside hotels, but the island's main streets have remained free of the Golden Arches for nearly half a century, being one of the earliest and most comprehensive examples of legislated anti-chain policy anywhere in the world. Bolivia provides a notable example of cultural preferences impacting business, where McDonald's entered the country with great enthusiasm but exited just eight years later, in 2002. This made Bolivia one of the few countries from which McDonald's has voluntarily withdrawn due to persistent commercial failure without any government intervention. Bolivian citizens simply preferred their traditional foods, such as salteñas, anticuchos, and llajwa, while the fast-food model never gained significant popularity. Similarly, San Marino, one of the world's smallest republics, declined to permit McDonald's as a deliberate act of culinary sovereignty, framing the decision in terms of protecting local food establishments from overwhelming global competition. Meanwhile, Bhutan went further still, embedding its resistance within a broader philosophy of governance. The Himalayan kingdom has consciously excluded McDonald's as part of its commitment to preserving culture and its focus on Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product, a framework in which the homogenising pressures of corporate fast food are antithetical to state values.

The Bigger Picture: What the Resistance Means

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), which has monitored restrictions on formula businesses for decades, has documented an increasing trend in the adoption of such policies throughout the United States. In 2024, for example, the city of Joseph, Oregon, implemented a formula business ordinance. Additionally, over 75 cities and towns have successfully blocked the development of dollar stores. In Chicago, a regulation requires a minimum distance of one mile between new dollar stores and existing ones. The language of chain-store resistance has quietly entered mainstream municipal planning. As sociologist George Ritzer observed, the spread of global chains involves more than the spread of restaurants, spreading a fast-food business model that shifts values, preferences, and the social structure of localities.

Cities that resist chain retail are not merely being sentimental. They argue that while economies of scale make such retail affordable, they also bring cultural costs that lead to a homogenization of places. As a result, the unique atmosphere of a locale, the memories associated with a family-run restaurant, and the uniqueness of a street that doesn’t resemble every other street are all things that hold value and are worth paying for. What unites Carmel and Calistoga, Ogunquit and Bermuda, Bolivia and Bhutan is the intuition that culture is not a backdrop to economic life but its content. That's when a town's streets begin to look like everywhere else; something is lost that cannot be recovered by merely adjusting the logo.

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