Buy Local Friday

Eighteen years ago, a group of environmentalists, social activists and concerned citizens around the world organized an event they called “Buy Nothing Day.” The idea was to protest rampant consumerism by buying nothing on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so named because it is supposedly the day that many retailers’ finances finally go into the black.

We are sympathetic with the basic sentiment underlying Buy Nothing Friday—that over-consumption and materialism are ravaging our planet and undermining our values and social fabric—but we don’t think it gets to the heart of what needs to be done. Human beings are, among other things, producers and consumers of things. The problem is not so much that we are buying things, but what we are buying, who we are buying it from, and how that affects the environment and community. Accordingly, we would like to propose an alternative: Buy Local Friday.

The pattern of recent decades that has been particularly devastating to the environment, and to members of the middle class everywhere, has been the expansion of a global economy that puts a premium on selling mountains of cheap goods to consumers, without regard to the job security and wages of working people. Global trade, within reason, is a good thing; but taken to extremes—and it has been—it can impoverish localities to the extent that the workforce can’t even afford the pile of cheap goods it has unleashed. The chickens of this kind of financial reality have come home to roost in today’s economy particularly painfully, when the mistakes of multinational bankers and investors are being paid for by Main Streets all around the world.

So what to do? State and local government dollars are drying up, the first jolt of Federal stimulus is coming to an end, and the big banks that have received multi-billion dollar bailouts have still not loosened the purse strings to small businesses and individuals. But even if we don’t have as much money to spend this year as last, there is one way to make those dollars count many times over: buy local.

It’s called the multiplier effect. Spend a dollar at the local hardware store, and the proprietor and its employees will have another dollar to spend at the local gift store, whose proprietor and employees will have another dollar to spend at the local grocery store, and so forth. Just one dollar, spent locally, can become many dollars in the local economy. And remember, sooner or later, that dollar may very well wind up in the hands of someone who needs to purchase the goods or services that you produce for a living.

Of course, in reality, it’s not quite that simple: the local stores you buy from have to buy some supplies from outside the area, sales tax goes to the state, and so forth. But the percentage of money spent at locally owned businesses that stays in our home area is still much higher than that spent at national chains—and nothing stays at home if you buy online.

Yes, the goods you buy at a locally owned business may cost more than they would at a big-box store or Internet site. But they’ll probably be of higher quality and, if handcrafted like so many of the fine crafts and artworks available at galleries, shops and art shows around the area, they’ll be unique. Think in terms of giving quality rather than quantity, giving items that will become heirlooms rather than wind up a few years down the road in landfills. Purchasing fewer, higher quality items from each other and bolstering the local economy, rather than buying more and cheaper goods that put profits in the hands of some distant corporate headquarters, strikes us as sending a more important (and practical) message than buying nothing.

If the multi-billion dollar bailouts of financial giants, with their sequel of continuing tight credit and soaring unemployment, have taught us anything, it is that if we’re looking for help in this economy, we are going to have to look out for each other. Let’s start by making Black Friday, Buy Local Friday. Let’s keep that spirit up through the holiday season. And after that, how about a New Year’s resolution to make 2010 a Buy Local year?

Also in this issue:

• The blessing of community

Dr. Punnybone

Time Travel