Essays from West of 98: Shop Local, Shop Small, Fix Potholes
Shop Local! We have all heard that marketing line at some point. It is a staple of Chamber of Commerce messaging for cities large and small. It encourages shoppers to keep their retail dollars at home. Over the years, this has been augmented by messaging like “shop small,” to prioritize small businesses over large chains.
“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is typically the busiest shopping day of the year. In 2010, American Express partnered with the National Trust for Historic Preservation (a nonprofit behind the nationwide Main Street program, among other projects) to create “Small Business Saturday” on the day after Black Friday. This was established to encourage holiday shopping with small businesses, particularly those of the traditional brick and mortar variety. American Express has since spent millions of marketing dollars promoting this initiative and small business trade groups, Chambers of Commerce, and local elected officials have followed suit in promoting the concept of holiday shopping with small, locally based retailers.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about worldwide trends in retail, particularly technology and an efficiency-driven supply chain. Those trends have presented some opportunities for small businesses to blossom in new ways, but they’ve also made life more difficult in other ways. The retail sector favors bigger chains. Small businesses and older chains have struggled to keep up. A global pandemic made life even more difficult. Many retailers large and small simply closed shop. Others struggled through and are still working to overcome that adversity.
As we consider the revitalization of rural America and the rebuilding of our local ecosystems, we must focus some attention on our local retail economy. The holiday shopping season is a perfect time to start that conversation.
Why does shopping local matter? I can give you “softer” reasons that we have all heard. Local businesses support your school and youth organization. Local businesses sponsor local events. Local businesses are owned and operated by your neighbors or people whose kids attend school with your kids, and so on.
Those reasons don’t matter to everyone. For some people, shopping is a matter of dollars and cents. That’s fine. Let’s talk about the dollars and cents. There are a variety of studies online (check out independentwestand.org, for one) that all show about the same thing. For every $100 you spend with a small business, $68 of that stays within the local community. When you shop with a larger chain, about $48 of that $100 stays in the local community. It does not take a peer-reviewed scientific study to confirm that when you shop outside of town, $0 of that stays within the local community.
Simply put, if you want better services locally, it is vital to spend your shopping dollars and cents locally. That includes spending money with local independent businesses and larger chains within your community, because whether $68 or $48 of your $100 stays local, it sure beats $0. Not only do those local businesses support local organizations and employee local people, they also pay local property taxes that fund local governments. They collect local sales tax revenues that are paid to our municipal governments for streets, parks, and other services. We can all complain about potholes in our towns, but pothole repairs and repaving streets are a direct function of sales tax revenues collected on the local level.
As we move into the holiday season, I encourage you to find new ways to shop local, shop small, and support small business, whether on Small Business Saturday or otherwise. Not everything is available locally and that’s okay, but you might be surprised how much you *can* buy locally. If I can split up my shopping into local and outside purchases, I believe it is worth the extra effort. When I do, I’ll think about the potholes and park improvements. That local sales tax dollar might not fix all the potholes, but it will be more helpful than not spending that local dollar at all.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.