Shopping Locally Helps You and Your Community

Shopping Locally Helps You and Your Community

We all know that shopping local helps our local business owners, but there is more to it than just helping a local business person earn a living. By shopping local, you’re making a big impact on your local economy, strengthening your community, protecting your community’s identity and even helping your environment.

Shopping Locally Helps You and Your CommunityHere are just a few ways that shopping local helps you and your community:

Every dollar spent in locally-owned businesses will have three times the impact on your community as that same dollar spent at a national chain store. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, invest in neighborhood improvement, promote community development and fund more city services through sales tax.

Locally owned businesses create more local jobs, and because local business owners generally care more about the community they serve, they often provide higher wages and better benefits than chain stores do.

Another reason it’s important to shop local is that your community is like no other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain your city’s diversity and distinctive flavor.

Shopping locally helps strengthen your community in other ways as well. That’s because locally owned businesses help build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities’ needs, connecting neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

Local business owners are more concerned with how their decisions impact their community.  When important business decisions are made locally, more consideration is given to how it will impact the community since the local business owner’s decisions will impact them as well as it does the community.

Local stores in town centers have a big impact on saving our environment as well. These businesses require little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services in comparison to big box stores and shopping malls. Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers, which keep our towns and cities beautiful.

Our local business districts are essential to reducing sprawl, lowering our overall automobile use,  preventing habitat loss, and keeping air and water pollution down.

A marketplace of many small businesses is the best way to ensure low prices and innovation over the long-term. A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

Shopping locally has a tremendous impact on our communities, but shopping locally can often be done online as well. Many small businesses have expanded their products and services online. You can have a greater impact on your community by shopping local this year and remembering these dates:

  • Small Business Saturday is November 29th
  • Cyber Monday is December 1st

Tell us how small businesses have impacted your local community on Facebook and Twitter!

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