Buying Local
February 22nd, 2006 by Mollie
People want to know why buying local is important and, in response, I want to share a couple of my own reasons for supporting local businesses.
1. Instead of giving more of my money to big corporations that I know nothing about, when I buy local, I am supporting people that are part of my community.
2. I personally want know the people who are growing my food, making my clothes, and brewing my coffee, as much as is possible. This may not seem like a good reason to some people, but to me this is very important because I want to have as much personal, human, face to face intereaction as possible in this growing world where we know of people instead of knowing people.
3. I get to know more about the company and the people I am supporting.
4. Because I know the people I am buying my products from and because they depend on the community for the survival of their business, I/we have the ability to be more involved and influential with regard to their practices. For example, is your local coffee shop using organic, shade grown, fair trade coffee? If it isn’t you are going to have a better chance convincing the owners to start using only organic, shade grown, fair trade coffee than convincing, let’s say, Starbucks.
5. Finally, because local companies function on a much smaller scale they usually do not have the negative social and environmental ramifications that large companies usually have.
What are some reason why you do or do not support local businesses?