Shopping locally is good for everyone. Why? Research shows that a dollar spent at a locally owned store is usually spent 6 to 15 times before it leaves the community. By contrast, a dollar spent at a national chain store results in 80% of that dollar leaving the neighbourhood immediately*.
Although the coupons are not longer valid, we’re leaving this shop local booklet online because it’s a great list of our local shops.
Special thanks to booklet designers Heather Corbin and Queenie Best. Your hard-earned money stays within the community, several times over when you shop locally!
Top 10 Reasons to Shop Local
1. JOB AND WAGES
Locally owned businesses create jobs in the neighbourhood and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
2. COMPETITION
A marketplace of many small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long term.
3. PRODUCT DIVERSITY
A multitude of neighbourhood-based small businesses, each selecting products based on their knowledge of the needs of their local customers, not on the decision of some distant executive and a national sales plan, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
4. PROTECT LOCAL CHARACTER AND PROSPERITY
Danforth East offers an eclectic mix of shops — some with a long tradition in the area, some brand new. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain our diversity and distinctive flavour.
5. KEEPING DOLLARS IN THE LOCAL ECONOMY
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 property tax, invest in neighbourhood improvement and promote community development.
6. COMMUNITY WELL-BEING
Locally owned businesses build strong neighbourhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbours, and by contributing more to local causes.
7. LOCAL DECISION MAKING
When the businesses in an area are locally owned, the important decisions are made locally, by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
8. PUBLIC BENEFITS AND COSTS
Local stores along main streets require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big-box stores and strip malls.
9. ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurship fuels North America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
10. ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable neighbourhoods, which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
Adapted and reprinted with permission of Stacy Mitchell, The Institute for Local Self-Reliance and StayLocal.org. *Cited from Northwest Earth Institute for Sustainable Living.