NOVEMBER 30, 2010
1. Be Some Place, Not Any Place
By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Austin’s diversity and distinctive flavor. Big Box and chain stores are the same everywhere – let’s keep Austin “Austin” for those who live here and those still on their way here.
2. Feel Right in Your Neighborhood
Local businesses build strong neighborhoods in a grass roots fashion -by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, contributing more to local causes, hiring local residents for most if not all of its positions, and buying from other local sources and services.
3. Our Town when it comes to Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community, who feel the impacts of those decisions and who are ready to step up as community leaders.
4. What’s Spent Locally Stays Local
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
5. Jobs and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do with greater job security.
6. Entrepreneurship Happens on Main Street
Entrepreneurs fuel America’s economic innovation and prosperity. Entrepreneurship serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage paying jobs and into the middle class.
7. Shopping Locally Saves Local Tax Dollars
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. Sustainability Makes you Happy
Localism reduces sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss and water pollution. Independently owned businesses more often source local products such as farm produce and local services such as legal, accounting, advertising.
9. Competition Makes Cents
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Make Mine Local for Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
Adapted and Reprinted from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance
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Neil Seldman
President
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
2001 S Street NW, Suite 570
Washington, DC 20009
202 898 1610 X 210
nseldman@ilsr.org
