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Valley Economics: Why You Should Please-Please-Please Buy (and Hire) Locally

September 26th, 2015

Filed under Community, Featured, Opinion

Downtown Paonia 1030's

Downtown Paonia -1930’s, when most people shopped locally.

Valley Economics: Why You Should Please-Please-Please Buy (and Hire) Locally

By Thomas Wills- North Fork Merchant Herald & Wills Gallery and Used Books

At local Chamber of Commerce meetings one topic that comes up perennially is the problem of how to encourage local people to shop locally and to hire local service people, lawyers, plumbers, builders, bankers, accountants, engineers, mechanics and patronizing the local movie theater, etc., instead of procuring all those items and services from Delta, Montrose or Grand  Junction?  The answer to this question is usually answered by the placing of an ad or two, making a few posters, or the printing of a bumper sticker. Please Shop Locally. Please.  Pleasepleaseplease. Pretty please with sugar on top.

With every passing year it seems that shopping somewhere other than locally becomes easier and easier.  In the first half of the 20th century shopping locally was a lot easier than travelling somewhere else. Local retail flourished—relatively.  Then roads to neighboring larger cities were being steadily improved, paved and then widened. Big box, deep discount retail arrived, usual in the larger cities, not small towns. The Internet arrived and connections become faster and faster. Any item on the planet is now a click and a Fed-Ex delivery away.

Who needs local when you have this level of selection and convenience? Well, you do.  Here are several reasons.

  1. Convenience. The Internet may make every weird thing  available, but you may need something right now—a drill bit for today’s project, a nut, bolt or a pound of drywall screws, a chicken for dinner, a plumber who doesn’t live an hour away, or a gift for the birthday tomorrow. Internet purchases average about a week to arrive, without paying an extra high premium, so buying locally for many things is practical. Plus grabbing something from the hardware, garden store or gift shop when picking up the mail or doing some banking down the street is pretty darn convenient.

And, if you don’t support local shops more often that when you have to those shops might go away, at a big loss in convenience.

  1. Community. Imagine a future where nearly everything is purchased over the Internet or from far-away big box discounters (who now sell and deliver via the Internet.) What would the downtowns of Paonia and Hotchkiss look like? All real estate offices, restaurants, non-profits, gas stations and empty retail spaces? What would be lost?

First, community.  Downtowns are the public squares and civic living rooms of small towns. They can be destroyed by simply choosing to shop elsewhere. Local businesses and their owners and employees are many times the most active community members, volunteering and donating to worthy local causes from kid’s ball teams, volunteer fire departments, to making local events happen. If retail goes away a lot of worthwhile things go with it including access to a lot of volunteers, energy and funding

Second, Community again. A downtown without vibrant retail is just an office park.

  1. Support for Municipal Services – The major source of revenue for most small towns is retail sales taxes. (Property taxes are a surprisingly small amount of municipal budgets.) No retail, no sales taxes, and less money to maintain basic infrastructure, recreational opportunities, support of community events, etc.  If you buy over the Internet currently no taxes are paid.  If you buy out-of-Valley the taxes paid go to support the place of purchase, not your hometown. If you buy your food at the Grand Junction Walmart and then complain about potholes in your Paonia street, you are one of the causes of the problem you are concerned about.
  2. The Multiplier Effect – Another frequently cited reason to shop or hire service providers in your own community is the multiplier effect. This is sort of like what happens when you donate to a charity that also has another pledged supporter who agrees to match your donation, thus doubling the amount. It works like this. You buy an item from a local store.  The local store makes a profit on that item and the owner spends a portion of that profit locally on paying employees, paying the municipal water/sewer bill, buying an ad in the local-local paper, donating to community non-profits and buying stuff like food locally. Then the local places that received that money spends a portion of the money they receive from the shop owner locally at other local business, paying employees and so on. When you add up all of the descending percentages of the original purchase profit it about doubles the amount of money you originally put into the local economy.

And if you buy something that is made in the community made mostly from local resources with local labor, the multiplier effect gets a lot larger.  A good example would be some locally grown produce being sold at Don’s Market or Hardin’s Natural Foods. Not only does the profit multiply, so does the wholesale purchase price. So as far as the Multiplier Effect goes there is buying local (small letters) and there is Buying Local. It also makes a significant difference whether a business is locally owned (Don’s Market) or corporately owned (City Market – Kroger).

The instant you buy something out-of-county the bonus effect of the multiplier is totally lost.

So buy locally, hire local service providers and donate to local non-profits. Please-please-please—with sugar on top. Or better yet, local honey on top.

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www.hardinsnaturalfoods.com

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