WHY SHOP LOCAL?
We all know how fun it is to shop
locally in our Peninsula communities, here are 10 other good reasons:
1. PROTECT LOCAL CHARACTER AND
PROSPERITY
Our peninsula communities are unlike
anywhere else in the world. By choosing to support locally-owned
businesses, you help maintain each of our town's diversity and
distinctive flavor.
2. COMMUNITY WELL-BEING
Locally owned businesses build strong
neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by
contributing more to local causes.
3. LOCAL DECISION MAKING
Local ownership means that important
decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and
who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. KEEPING DOLLARS IN THE LOCAL ECONOMY
Your dollars spent in locally-owned
businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars
spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously
create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in
neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
5. JOB AND WAGES
Locally owned businesses create more
jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits
than chains do.
6. ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurship fuels America's
economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for
families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
7. PUBLIC BENEFITS AND COSTS
Local stores in town centers require
comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of
public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Local stores help to sustain vibrant,
compact, walkable town centers, which in turn are essential to
reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water
pollution.
9. COMPETITION
A marketplace of tens of thousands of
small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices
over the long-term.
10. PRODUCT DIVERSITY
A multitude of small businesses, each
selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their
own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a
much broader range of product choices.
Adapted and reprinted with permission
of Stacy Mitchell, The Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
