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I have mentioned more than once the importance of shopping locally. This is an issue that is dear to my heart, so I wanted to address the reasons why keeping your money in the local market is beneficial on many different levels.

Preserve Local Character

Celebrate what makes your particular area unique. What is it about your city that is unlike any other in the world? By shopping at locally-owned businesses, you help maintain your town’s diversity and distinctive flavor.

Strengthen Your Community

People who own and run local businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes. When you buy from local businesses, you can feel confident that you, too, are helping to strengthen the community.

Foster Local Decision Making

Local business owners participate in making decisions that impact the community. By supporting them, you ensure that those decisions are made by people who live and work in the area and who will feel the impact of their choices.

Strengthen Your Local Economy

A study of local shopping from Austin, Texas illustrated that $45 of every $100 spent at the local bookstore stayed in the local community, compared to just $13 if the same amount was spent in Borders or another national chain. By shopping locally, you not only help create jobs and fund more city services through sales tax, you also invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

Create Jobs and Preserve Wage Levels

Your locally-owned businesses create more jobs at the local level; in some instances they can even provide better wages and benefits than chains offer.

Entrepreneurship

The entrepreneurial spirit is what fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity. When we support entrepreneurs, we contribute to the economic foundation that serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

Reduce Environmental Impact and Preserve Local Culture

Local businesses typically exist and thrive in culturally vibrant, compact, walking and/or biking-friendly town centers. This approach to shopping is essential to reducing urban sprawl, automobile usage and habitat loss, as well as air, sound and water pollution. It also helps to keep local art and history alive as opposed to national chain stores that are devoid of anything of cultural value.

Foster Competition and Diversity

A marketplace of many small businesses ensures innovation and low prices, whereas two or three big box stores limits the incentive for creative product ideas and buying options.

Small businesses generally offer services and products based upon their personal interests and the needs of their local customers, which guarantees a much broader range of product choices. Conversely, large chain stores depend on a national sales plan devised by people on the other side of the country based upon data collected by shoppers all over the nation. The result is generic product and service options.

The next time you need to shop, please take a moment and consider where you go to purchase your products and services. The choice you make will have a large impact on the environment and your local community. It definitely makes sense to shop locally!

Photo by: Uncle Weeds