As recent DM conversations attest, it’s tough to say, “Support local business” without being accused of being an elitist more concerned with fads than with the plight of the working poor.

Of course it’s not that simple. The value of supporting your neighbors and keeping money in your own community is, historically, neither a fad nor a dalliance of the affluent. Rather, it’s been a cornerstone of survival for the working class.

Exhibit A: This catchy tune from the Reverend J.M. Gates, a 20s-era African American preacher from right here in the ATL.

What a toe-tapper! I don’t think there’s a single thing I don’t love about it, because it shows that promoting local has very little to do with elitism or trendy hipsters and almost everything to do with the basic human values of community building and survival. In short, money spent in one’s own community is like Karma. It comes back to you in other ways.

Or, in the parlance of Decatur, it’s an investment in both economic sustainability and social sustainability.

Being pro-local is not the same thing as being anti-affordable goods. It’s not an either/or proposition, especially in an urban context like Decatur’s. It’s simply an acknowledgment that, when times turn tough, chain retail (which, in our modern world, most often occupies a big box) has no allegiance to you. Your neighbors, on the other hand, do. There’s nothing wrong with doing what we can to keep those connections strong, even when our present reality makes big box shopping a necessity for a whole lot of people.

A trip to Walmart or Target is an acknowledgement of the present. Some money spent with Decatur businesses is an investment in the future. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason we can’t allow people the freedom to do both if they’re so inclined.

Over at The Decatur Minute, Catherine has posted the finalists in Decatur’s “Buy Local” slogan contest.  Here’s one…

CLICK HERE to see the rest!

Avondale writer Patti Ghettzi bursts our bubble with an article recently published in Mother Nature Network, titled “My Year of Shopping Locally”.  In her email to DM she notes “I don’t name the businesses, because I wrote it for a national audience, but it’s pretty obvious whom I’m talking about.”

In the article, Ghettzi recaps the times in the past year when she vowed to “buy local” and ended up disappointed.  Reasons for disappointment ranged from having a bad experience with a shopkeeper to being unable to find items in stock, or just unwilling to pay more for something she could find for less online.

But before we local-devotees jump down Ghettzi’s throat with cries of cherry-picking and not looking at the bigger picture, I think we should first consider the value of such an article.  With its near cult-like status, it’s admittedly pretty easy for advocates to live comfortably inside the local movement vilifying all things big-box and tongue-kissing anything that’s displayed in the quaint corner store.

Of course, life, love and community are never that simple.

Read the rest of this entry »

In complement to the previous post, this morning’s NY Times used the closing of a Chappaqua, NY bookstore to examine what’s putting indie bookstores out of business.

And while I don’t think the article’s conclusions would be considered earth-shattering (surprise!  It’s Amazon and big-boxes!), I thought this quote resonated…

There’s so much noise in American life that we tend to hear only the loudest: Obama-mania! A.I.G. Mania! March Madness!

Way down on the decibel scale is a buy-local movement struggling to be heard. On the Internet, in small business groups, even from groups focused on local bookstores (www.indiebound.org) its message is that if people want local stores, a downtown that’s vital, they should shop there, even if they can get the Tylenol cheaper at Target and the John Grisham book cheaper at Amazon.

Nothing is forever, certainly not an independent bookstore. A lot of things killed our bookstore, including the terrible economy and the incessant information overload that makes reading a book like a quaint rite from the past. But if we lost it out of indifference, or to save a buck or two on Amazon, we lost a lot more than we saved.

Buy local.