Filed under: Consumer experience, Rants and raves, Small business
It’s simple for me to preach “shop local” from my blogger’s perch in Manhattan. While many companies are headquartered here in New York, boutiques, bodegas and mom & pop shops rule this roost. Aside from Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) — c’mon, they’re ubiquitous — and maybe Rite Aid (NYSE: RAD), I’d have to hike a mile or so to reach the nearest publicly traded business.
But committing my Christmas dollars to local businesses is a tradition I picked up from my ex back in North Carolina, and I think I’m all the superior for it — and all the better served.
For starters, you’re far more apt to be wowed with the service from a small shop. At a local business, often you deal directly with the shop owners, who have an undeniable stake in your transaction. Because their equity and livelihood depend upon the repeat business of customers like yourself, you’re worth more to the small business owner than the customer queued up at a crowded cash register at Circuit City (NYSE: CC) or Sears (NASDAQ: SHLD), and that value is evident in the transaction.
Many local merchants are passionate and knowledgeable about their products — after all, these folks didn’t launch their businesses by accident. Many boutique owners are living their dream — they probably worked many years just toward the goal of launching this business. Instead of dealing with a high school senior working an after-class gig, you’re speaking to someone with a deep knowledge of most everything in the store, who’d probably love nothing more than to talk to you for hours about the ins and outs of their wares. Buying a home-brewing kit for my brother-in-law a few years ago, I thought the gabby owner would never let me leave.
Talking of which, small shops are often the only place to find that one-of-a-kind, special gift. Try finding a brewing kit at Target (NYSE: TGT)! My hunt led me to a laid-off IT guy and his hound dog, selling malt and hops out of a woodstove-warmed workshop in the country. That’s a slice of life much more rewarding than a trip to the mall.
Small businesses also have a vested interest in improving your community, since it’s their community too. Money spent locally is more prone to be reinvested locally, be it at another business or perhaps through a building and loan association (’tis the season of George Bailey, after all). If you’re supporting your neighbors, your neighbors are more apt to improve their homes and your neighborhood, which raises your own property values. If you’re shopping at a chain store, you’re sending money away to a corporation, which benefits you only if you’re a shareholder.
In the same vein, failed small businesses are also less of a risk to property values. Like most downtown districts I’ve found, the downtown in my North Carolina hometown has always been in an organic say of transition. Businesses launch, businesses shutter, but the vacancies are easily absorbed. What’s not so easily absorbed is the site of our first Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), which sat vacant for four years after a Wal-Mart Supercenter opened just down the highway (just this month finally, a Peebles (NYSE: SSI) moved in, and Tractor Supply Company (NASDAQ: TSCO) recently announced its plans for the space). In the interest of fairness, I should note that the new Supercenter anchors an aesthetically repulsive but undeniably booming shopping center just off Interstate 95, and has drawn in other businesses, both national franchises and local shops.
Sick of shoving your way through the seasonal mall crowds? Small businesses would probably love to have the headache of shoppers lined up out the door, but until that happens, stretch out in your favorite local shop and take advantage of the room to roam.
And if you’re one to complain about the loss of domestic jobs due to outsourcing, or the influx of shoddy lead-laden items from China, put your money where your mouth is and start devoting your dollars to the small businesses and local products around you, for all the reasons above. You might be detracting in an infinitesimally slight way from the common wealth of chain stores’ shareholders, but you’re adding value to your own surroundings, and the lives around you.
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