Would you or wouldn't you? The Anti-WalMart movement

[OakLeaf]

Yup. It's really only tangentially about Wal-Mart. Grocery stores are the same thing. Even though Kroger's is union and I feel MUCH better about shopping there than I do about shopping at XXX, I try to do as much of my grocery shopping as possible at farmer's markets and locally owned stores. Yes, even though there may be many things I can only get at Kroger's, and even though the price of staples and local dairy products may be higher than mass-distributed staples and factory-farmed dairy.

On the average, spending money in a locally owned store even for non-locally produced goods returns 30% more to the local economy. So for my 10% extra expenditure, I get better JOBS (which if I were working, might benefit me directly), better roads (and have to spend that much less on shock absorbers and tires), better funded schools (so parents have to spend less out of pocket for books, supplies, and extracurriculars), more police, EMT and fire protection (decreasing losses in those areas), etc. Well worth the investment IMVHO. Shopping at any non-locally owned store for price reasons alone is a deeply false economy.

Yes, there are times that I do it for convenience reasons. So having already purchased "local bucks" would be an incentive for me to take my wallet to the local store first even though it might mean an extra trip to the big-box store if local doesn't carry what I need. Then there are people who are so impoverished that that extra 10% makes a huge difference in their ability to afford their basic necessities. "Local bucks" would help them avoid sucking even more money out of the local economy, ultimately helping themselves earn higher wages and avoiding placing more of their neighbors into their own position.

So I vote yes.


PS.... since Mr. S used the old cliche about the "better mousetrap," I had to add this little story, which is pretty closely on point in a couple of different ways. Somebody DID build a better mousetrap. It's called a "Mice Cube," and even though they're manufactured in China of cheap plastic, they are ingeniously simple, wondrously effective and reusable many, many times. (We have a big problem with mice at our house. ) What happens when somebody literally builds a better mousetrap? Stores stop carrying it, because they can make more money selling mousetraps that don't work as well and break after a few uses (or are intended to be single-use). When we broke a couple of our 5-year-old Mice Cubes this year and tried to find new ones, we wound up having to order them online. At least they're still available, but somehow I doubt it will be for long. If I were a little more enterprising I'm sure they'd be very easy to make out of a sheet of thin Plexi-Glas.