People have always been afraid and even ignorant about ideas and methods that may result in change. Fear of change caused ridicule of Christopher Columbus, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. There are other examples of how fear of change had effects on progress: department stores and franchises.

In the 1800s, people bought what they needed at small, family-owned shops. Then a man named W.T. Grant had an idea that created change: 

• What if we combined all these separate, little shops by making them individual departments under one roof, in one large store? 

Customers loved the new and better way of doing things.

The individual merchants who owned the old-fashioned retail stores saw their businesses decline. The shopkeepers fought back politically. There were thousands of them with thousands of votes, and they lobbied for their right to do things the same old way.

They finally got the local and state governments to outlaw Grant’s department stores. Eventually, Grant’s department store won out. If there is a better way it will persist.

In the early 1960s franchising was a revolutionary new technology in business, and it was also met with resistance. Newspapers and magazines wrote what a scam and rip-off franchising was. Stories of people who lost their life savings to some franchise were everywhere.

There was a strong move to make franchising illegal. In fact, franchising actually came within 11 votes of being outlawed by Congress. Today this ‘so-called scam’ is responsible for over 34 percent of all retail sales in North America. Franchises sell nearly 800 billion dollars worth of goods and services today. 

Every industry goes through an evolution similar to this: 

• Chiropractors were considered quacks in the 1970s
• The stock market was considered shady and a form of gambling
• The first newspaper in British North America, The Public Occurrence (1690), was suppressed by the governor of Massachusetts. 

Now, we almost can’t do without these industries.