Local Economics

When money is kept within a community, it is like blood circulating in the body and nurturing life. A local grocery store employs people who live in the community. The employees are able to spend money at the local hardware store and with the local plumber. Guess what, the owners of these businesses also live in the community. When they go to spend their profits, they will likely do so close to home. This enriches other members of the community. They will spend their money with other local businesses that create profit and jobs for more local people. This creates an upward spiral of growth that sustains the community.

By contrast, what do you think happens when you spend your money outside of your community? It’s simple, the money enriches another community and your community stays pretty much where it has always been. This is what happens every time you spend your money at a chain store. Let’s say you’re seduced by short-term savings at Walmart. Those savings sure look good on the surface. But what’s happening is you’re destroying higher paying local jobs and replacing them with lower paying ones. At first it’s someone else’s job. They lose and you win. But what happens when it’s your job? This is detrimental to your economic survival in the long run. All the profit Walmart earns from your purchases is shipped off someplace else, perhaps to another country. What happens to your neighborhood? Wealth leaves your community, never to be seen again. Entire books have been written about the effects of shopping at Walmart. Read one. You might be surprised to find out you’re not really saving at all.

We can hear many of you now. You want to tell us that you don’t work in retail and jobs at Walmart have nothing to do with you. But maybe you work for a manufacturer that supplies Walmart? Or maybe you work for a company that performs services for a company that supplies Walmart. The effect is far reaching and already dominates a huge number of companies.

Who is in a better position to make changes in this world; Walmart, Target, Home Depot or you? Many of us are quick to answer that the big companies have all the power. We point to the fact that they have sales bigger than the economies of entire countries. But we're overlooking something incredibly important. What would happen to a store if people stopped shopping there? No matter how small or big the store is, it can’t stay in business if nobody shops there. The power does NOT belong to the big corporation, it belongs to you. It is up to each of us to decide what kind of world we want to live in and that starts at home with the decisions we make each time we go to the store. Every day, we are voting with our dollars and determining our fate and that of our friends and neighbors. We can choose to strengthen our local economy or destroy it. It is entirely up to us.