10 reasons to shop local
1
Money stays longer in the local economy
2 It helps nurture the development
of communities
3 It helps promote tourism
4 It helps prevent Clone Towns
5 Local businesses are good
neighbours
6 It’s better for our
planet
7 It helps preserve choice
and diversity
8 It helps promote competition
and business innovation
9 It promotes local democracy
10 You can get an enormous
sense of well-being from doing it
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to the Shop Here directory
1 Money
stays longer in the local economy
Research suggests that a pound
spent with a local business stays in the local economy for five
more transactions.
A pound spent with a national business
operating locally stays in the local economy for just two transactions.
The difference is how your money
is then spent on. If you buy your goods from businesses that themselves
source their products locally, this ensures the money is re-spent
locally, helping to strengthen the local economy.
A local business will also use
far more local services than a national business, again keeping
that money in the local environment.
At the most simple level, imagine painting a pound coin red and
watching where it goes.
Every time it changes hands within
a community, it means income for a local person. So the more times
it is spent locally, the better for that community. But if that
money is spent with a national business, it is likely to be used
to purchase goods and services from outside the area. The profits
will go outside the area.
A local B&B will generate more
money for the local economy than a chain hotel that employs non-local
staff, has non-local owners and buys, for example, its legal and
catering services from large national companies.
At its most extreme, imagine a
community with high unemployment, where money comes into the economy
from social security and is then immediately spent at nationally-owned
discounted food stores who take their profits out of the community.
That is why a vibrant local economy sustaining local businesses
is vital.
2 It helps nurture the development
of communities
If an area has a pub or a corner shop or post office
it creates a focal point where people can meet, socialise and communicate.
If one of these businesses is successful it will encourage other
businesses to open nearby.
A thriving, re-energised local community gives people
a sense of belonging and personal involvement. Interacting in daily
activities and knowing people around you helps encourage a feeling
of neighbourhood and community, local pride and identity, and fosters
mutual support.
It is through the family and locally-owned businesses such as cafés,
butchers and bakers that people get to know one another.
A thriving local business environment encourages the
development of networks, provides a greater sense of personal involvement,
belonging and responsibility. It increases social inclusion and
has been proven to help reduce stress and loneliness, and cut crime
and aggression.
The closure of small local independent businesses,
particularly in communities such as villages, denies access to basic
resources for many people, especially where public transport is
inadequate or even unavailable. This creates ‘food deserts’
where shopping becomes more expensive and difficult for those who
do not have access to a car, such as poorer families, the old and
the infirm.
3 It helps promote tourism
Tourism is one of our most important, if not most
important, business sectors and its success depends on us offering
something distinctive and characterful – not bland.
So, as well as the Broads and beautiful coastline
and beaches, we need craft shops and pottery shops, we need pubs
and restaurants that aren’t chains and are advocates of local
menus and local beverages. These are the things a jaded tourist
palate wants: something different they can’t get elsewhere.
4 It helps prevent Clone
Towns
Sir Paul Smith, one of the country’s foremost
trendsetters, has bemoaned the globalisation of fashion and design,
saying: “These days, when every city sells the same clothes,
the same brands, the same coffee, isn’t it special to have
something different?”
As far as our High Streets are concerned, different
is increasingly becoming the exception. Certainly that’s the
finding of a report by the New Economics Foundation think tank,
which says that Britain is fast becoming a nation of Clone Towns,
with our individual shops losing out against featureless, identikit
shops owned by powerful chains.
As a spokesperson for NEF says, “Local shops
tend to act like social glue that holds communities together in
a way that big retail giants can’t. Clone Town Britain creeps
up on you – suddenly your town looks the same as every other
one.”
5 Local businesses are
good neighbours
National businesses care less about local environments
than local businesses because they don’t live there.
A sense of belonging builds local pride. Local businesses
are run by people who have invested their time and energy and money
in working in local communities: they work symbiotically with other
businesses. National businesses invest their efforts in making more
profits for their shareholders.
6 It’s better for
our planet
Friends of the Earth estimate that only one to two
per cent of supermarket turnover comes from food obtained from providers
within thirty miles of their shops.
There is an environmental price to pay for being able
to buy Peruvian asparagus in October and Egyptian strawberries during
our winter. This involves more ‘food miles’, possibly
using artificial preservation, making unnecessary packaging and
creates more pollution than would be necessary if the food was purchased
from a local business.
And even if a supermarket has, for example, Norfolk
potatoes on its shelves, it’s likely that they were dug up
in the county, transported elsewhere for processing and packaging,
and then delivered to stores around the country, including those
in this region.
7 It helps preserve choice
and diversity
Why does this matter? Because not only does it deprive
shoppers of choice, it also means that local businesses are being
forced out of the High Street through higher rents and with them
goes diversity, charm and individuality. The personality of our
High Streets is changing – and not for the better.
Homogenised shopping thoroughfares of bland look-alikes
mean that choice is being denied to consumers and distinctiveness
and character are being taken out of the shopping experience.
8 It helps promote competition
and business innovation
Forty years ago, small independent retailers provided
over sixty per cent of the retail food markets. Six years ago, it
was down to just six per cent.
Four major supermarkets alone share almost seventy
five per cent of the overall market, and these companies are increasingly
broadening their range of products, from groceries to clothes, electrical
goods, DVDs, furniture and more.
If a few big businesses monopolise trading, using
their bulk-buying power and efficiencies, and becoming one-stop
shops, then smaller independent businesses will close.
By reducing competition, the customer will not see
long-term improvements in quality and service.
The development of effective monopolies in various area of business,
particularly in retail, also makes it more difficult and expensive
for local people to set up themselves, so stifling competition and
limiting customer choice.
9 It promotes local democracy
Government decision-making is increasingly concerned
with improving opportunities for national businesses to operate
in a global economy.
ut this can be detrimental to local business, burdening
them with greater cost and bureaucracy. Supporting local business
decentralises wealth (and therefore power and influence) down to
local level.
As the New Economics Foundation states: “The
current economic model favours the large, remote and uniform, and
threatens our local economies and communities, diversity and choice.”
10 You can get an enormous
sense of well-being from doing it
Small local retailers are better placed to liaise
with, and source from, local suppliers from whom they are more prepared
to buy at small levels of production.
This helps small family-farms, which cannot meet the
industrial scale of production demanded by major retailers, at least
not without employing intensive farming techniques, adding additional
cost or possibly letting quality suffer. The agricultural methods
of smaller farms is know to be better for the preservation of wildlife
and also helps maintain the unique character of our countryside.