If you’ve seen page 10 of today’s paper, you know that the latest effort is under way to encourage Sweet Home residents to spend money in Sweet Home.
Arts in Bloom is a Sweet Home Active Revitalization Effort event designed to bring customers to businesses in the community. It is running all week, with works by local artists on display in various stores and businesses throughout town. In visiting, not only do you have a chance to check out some local creative talent but you get to know a local business better.
We’ve written about “shop local” before, so this shouldn’t be new to anybody. We’ve talked about how important it is to patronize local businesses, to keep dollars at home.
Research has shown that for every $100 spent at a locally-owned business, $68 stays in the local economy compared to only $43 if spent at a national chain. I’m not making this up to keep you home. Run an Internet search (try the phrase “dollar spent locally”) and you’ll find these studies are everywhere, and they all say basically the same thing.
They say that if you spend it here, other people benefit from it before it leaves town. Depending on where you shop out of town, that may not be true.
Why should we shop locally? The short answer is that if you want the convenience of local food, goods and services, you have to make it economically viable for someone to provide those things. We understand the objections, often valid, that local goods and services are priced higher than those out of town. True, but part of the reason for that is because there is little competition in town for some goods and services because too few people do their business here.
Most of our local merchants cannot buy in bulk, like the giant chain stores, and they are certainly not jacking up their profit margin. But it takes a certain amount of income to keep a business viable and if customer flow is inconsistent or light, businesses have to charge more to survive.
The question we have to ask ourselves is how much we value being able to buy such-and-such here in town? If we want it now, we know what we have to do.
That brings up another aspect of shopping local, more of a psychological one. When you spend a dollar in a store down the street or when you buy a hamburger at a local eatery, you’re making a statement, a vote of confidence, that you value that business, that you want them here. The benefit to a business isn’t just economic, it is a pat on the back when you walk through the door. That’s important too, especially in these tough times.
The recession has exacerbated the difficulties many local merchants are experiencing. Food prices are going up, forcing restaurant owners to rewrite their menus. We all know that fuel is almost 25 percent more than it was a few months ago.
That will take a toll on our pocketbooks in a variety of ways, not just at the gas station. Postal rate hikes have affected us, here at The New Era, and other businesses. All of this makes it even more difficult to keep prices down.
As mentioned earlier, we’d be pulling the wool over our own eyes not to acknowledge that local prices can be a hindrance to buying locally. However, local merchants want our business and it’s been my experience that some are willing to talk turkey if it means keeping money in town. If you’re building a house, for instance, and you’re buying materials, give local dealers your list and tell them what the big boys out of town can do it for. Your local merchant may be willing to take less to keep you here.
I admit that I have a selfish interest in seeing dollars stay in Sweet Home. But so do you, if you like reading about your local community.
All of what I’ve been talking about has a direct effect on us here at The New Era and, by extension, on you. Have you noticed how thin the papers have been in recent months? Instead of 24 or 28 pages of news and photos of your kids, we’re scrunching as much as we can into 16 or 20.
That’s because businesses aren’t advertising in the newspaper like they did before the recession hit. Advertising pays almost all of the bills at a newspaper. So when merchants cut back on promoting themselves in the local newspaper, we can’t afford to print as many pages and you get less news and photos. And believe me, it kills us not to be able to run some of the great shots we get.
Keeping your dollars in town whenever possible helps you and it may help The New Era.
When you spend your money at a local business, particularly an independent one – which nearly all in east Linn County are – a large portion of your dollar floats around, some of it into paychecks of your friends who work locally, others into other businesses, such as your newspaper.
You can help both the newspaper and your local merchants and service providers by telling them how their advertising is working.
Most local businesspeople don’t have the resources t o do surveys on how their advertising works, but you can help them. Tell them why you’re there. Are you there because you saw a SHARE ad for Arts in Bloom? A flyer on a window? A card on the bulletin board at the post office? An ad in The New Era?
They may not rush over and give you a hug of gratitude, but they will appreciate, at some level, the fact that you’re patronizing their business.
Today’s paper has a heavy focus on shopping locally, since we’re running our monthly special section that encourages people do just that.
If we want Sweet Home to continue to develop, to climb out of the hole created for this town by powers beyond its control, each of us has to take a step or two, or more in the direction of revitalizing the community by shopping locally.
Visit the art exhibits this week. Meet your local business people. Maybe spend a little money – here at home.
Doing that will help us all.