For use: Friday, April 13, 2001

Future Shoes: "My Little Town"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

I sometimes write about Joseph Schumpeter's concept of the "engine of creative destruction" that is American capitalism, and how it generally helps keep us growing and vital. Companies and good ideas die horrible deaths, as with the recent spate of dotcoms. People are ruined and thrown onto the street. But somehow, they are replaced by new companies and ideas, and life goes on and progress is made. This conflagration is healthy and positive, in the aggregate. This is my futurist optimism, anyway.

But there is another side of me, darkly streaked with Luddite pessimism. It is more intimate than my optimism, because it is about my immediate environment. Let me give you a rundown of the "creative destruction" that has occurred in my  little town of Minneapolis/Saint Paul in the last few years:

• We had a utility company called Northern States Power or NSP. But as it became more powerful (and less Northern), it decided to trash the old name and become Excel Energy. Millions of identy-change commercials later, Excel still seems like a stranger -- a stranger charging a hell of a lot for heating.
• For years we had an odious telco called US West, which replaced a slightly less odious, more provincial Northwestern Bell. But now US West has been taken over by an even more odious Qwest. The company radiates bottom-line creepiness.
• Until two years ago we were a leading regional banking center, with two robust banks, Norwest Bancorp and First Bank System. Not no more though. Norwest was gobbled up by Wells Fargo in a merger that led all the banking administration in bondage to San Francisco. And First Banks decided "first" wasn't good enough, and so transmuted into USBank, joining up with a Chicago bank -- just in time to pick up the US that US West was discarding.
• Dayton's, the name of our oldest and most locally revered department store, is changing to Marshall Fields, the better-known Chicago nameplate it acquired a few years ago. (The Dayton-Hudson Corp., the parent company, changed its name to Target Corp., after the discount store responsible for most of the revenue stream. That one doesn’t bother us so much, but it might bum the Hudson Dept. Store fans in Detroit.)
• Even the milling industry, the driver of our early economy, has turned inside out. Pillsbury was absorbed into a British holding company, Grand Metropolitan PLC, and later spun and acquired by onetime crosstown rival General Mills. A few leftover business lines, cake mixes and the Robin Hood flour label, were swallowed by International Multifoods. Doughboy, we hardly knew ye.
• Our beloved down-home TV station WCCO ("the voice of the upper midwest") became a holding in the CBS portfolio. It feels that way, too , that it no longer has the local connection. It has been Ratherized.
• For years one of our top employers and corporate citizens, Honeywell, was acquired twice in one year, first by Allied Signal, then by General Electric.
• Our top brokerage, Piper Jaffray, was acquired by US Bancorp. Another financial mainstay, Dain Kallman & Quail, was acquired by a German investment bank. Our top mutual fund family, IAI Funds merged with Federated Funds. (Our city's tallest building, the IDS Center, is named after a mutual funds brand that vanished into its parent company, American Express.)

What else. Well, the local professional football and baseball sports teams have served notice that they are free agents and will leave our area unless voters kick in $1 billion plus for new digs for them. And the Census Bureau has informed Saint Paul that henceforth our statistical zone will be named after Minneapolis, and not both cities.

Meanwhile we suffer from the usual death of small local things to give way to big remote things -- Amazon, Wal-Mart, Home Depot.

What I am talking about is globalization, corporatization, the things that the rich kids busted windows over in Seattle and Davos, with which I have no sympathy. In the aggregate I still agree that it is better to let things die than to prop them up artificially against the overriding economic reality, which is that small and local is expensive.

But our identity is taking a beating here. We used to have six Fortune 500 companies here, a lot for a small state . Now they’re all gone but 3M and General Mills. People feel they are losing control.

I don’t know how to reconcile the futurist and the Luddite raging within me. The best we can do for now is to try preserve the past in whatever ways we can, in hopes that small and local become cool again, and people choose it over the big and faraway. Then it will be the future, the new economy will be an old economy as well, and my ambivalence can finally be resolved.

Provided everything hasn't already been bulldozed.

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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