I was reading about some local policy changes intended to make running a small business easier and that got me thinking. I go to restaurants and ethnic food stores which are usually small businesses, and maybe some of the gas stations I use are small businesses too. However, everything else I buy comes from big-box stores or the internet. These have replaced a lot of small businesses, but how is it that there are any little shops left at all? Sometimes I walk into a corner store because I don’t want to go all the way to the big box store or wait for delivery but the prices are so much higher (often by over a hundred percent) that I walk right out again unless I need something very urgently.
I’m not making a moral judgement here. I just don’t know how the economics work out.
Exactly like you - restaurants and grocery I can do local small business. Also services, haircut and such, I don’t use chain places. And I try to pay very local people for anything we get done to the house, the pets, the yard.
But the “corner convenience store” that has the household stuff is Walgreens, there isn’t a local equivalent nearby and yes buying stuff 'on the ground ’ sometimes costs so very much more than ordering online.
My local hardware store stands apart as an indispensable local retail utility and I buy everything I possibly can there, because I like having a local hardware store and occasionally really need one. I buy all the household cleaning products I can there, for example, because they sell them, I need them, and I’m incredibly happy to pay whatever extra 40 cents they cost over having Amazon pack up a box of dish pods into its own cardboard box and truck it out to my house,
I only see advantages in the long term in supporting the local comerce, even if you can find cheaper stuff in any agressive big-box or on-line stores, they are big because they aim for one only thing: monopoly.
I try to do most of my shopping at small businesses and I almost never buy anything from the Internet. I find it’s usually cheaper when you take into account shipping and whatever fees get tacked on, and I also get the thing I want that day. I know I’m not getting scammed because I can see the thing in my hands, I know what I’m getting. The chain I go to the most is my grocery store. For eating out I go to a small locally owned restaurant because it’s about the same price or cheaper than the fast food.
I’m lucky enough to live in a city that has all this so I don’t look down on people who can’t access this stuff and have to buy online, but I do push people to at least but directly from people instead of Amazon. I’ve also never bought a thing from Amazon, ever.
I guess I’m an outlier but with where I live and what I want or need, it’s pretty easy to not buy from the Internet or big box stores.
I try to buy local if I can, but like you say, it’s not always possible, and often comes with an attractive price tag.
The things that I feel matter are supporting local farms and food markets, as well as local businesses. I’d rather support my local dentist than a national chain. I’d rather buy my veg from the Saturday farmers market than from the grocery store, when able. Keeping the money local does play a part in maintaining the local economy. Most of our purchases wind up shipping money out of our community, so I try where I can to plug the leak.
I’m also a small business, so it’s important to show my support for others.
There are a lot of farms around here, and thus a lot of farmer’s markets. There’s a lot of craft breweries, and the downtown core has recently been gentrified so there are a ton of small businesses there. A witchy store, a book store, a jewellery store, a collectibles store, a coffee roastery, a barber shop, a piercing/tattoo parlour, and don’t get me started on the restaurants.
There’s been a lot of investment in the area to make it walkable, and I’ve seen a huge uptick in tourists since it looks so appealing now.
Neighbour,
The small neighbourhood bookstore, hardware store, or food store may not be as cheap as a big brand, but the staff usually know what they’re talking about (nice in a bookstore, important in a hardware store when you have no idea on how to fix a leak). Moreover, they’re here, and don’t need 3 days of delivery.
Finally, shops nearby are part of what makes a neighbourhood nice, some people know it, and will spend the extra cash to not complaint about their dead/empty neighbourghood
I live in a city that offers nearly any type of service/shop local to me so nowadays I’ll likely use them here unless what I’m searching for is overly specific.
My mom recently took me to a store selling minerals and fossils, which while not my scene, is quite an interesting place to just walk through.
Realistically I should probably get some of my food from a farming coop but my volume is so low and the supermarket is right in front of my door, to make that the main exception.
Prices sometimes are higher but typically not egregiously so, and for some things i find it within myself to pay that higher price.
I’ll grab some beers from the minimarkt at most. Everything else comes from the supermarket. And I often pass those tiny stores that never seem to have any customers – e.g. a shop just for socks? – and I always wonder how they can exist. There must be some kind of tax breaks or tax evasion going on.
I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there? That same friend told me that at least some of those stores are vanity projects for that same sort of rich person - they want to own the sort of store they think is cool or cute, and they don’t actually need it to turn a profit.
Yeah I suppose those boutique shops are more for rich people but there’s shops with cheap stuff too, often kind of hidden and unwelcoming. I used to live across from one for a while before I even realized it was a shop, and it was still open. Just saw the guy closing up but never saw a customer. I had a look out of curiosity and it was just some old guy selling bottles of washing liquid and everything was covered in a layer of dust like it hadn’t been touched in years. He looked happy to see a customer so I felt sorry for him to just walk out again.
I prefer to support small businesses, but anytime I visit any in my area, they generally offer similar or the exact same products that I can order online for less.
I’m struggling enough right now, and every dollar counts. I’m rooting for the little guys, but I’m not willing to go broke to save them.
You just gotta be careful. Megacorps will drop prices to take advantage of the exact logic you’ve laid out. On an individual day you’re gonna save money on an individual purchase with them, sure.
But once the local place goes out of business, suddenly there isn’t anyone for them to undercut, so the prices creep back up.
Then you’re in the exact same situation as before, usually a bit worse. Except, before, the money you spent at the local business would mostly recirculate within your actual community. Now it’s being siphoned off into some yacht measuring contest. Local wages go down because people need to take jobs at the big companies, which then reinforces the “every dollar counts” problem, making it ever harder for your community to reverse course.
This gets worse and worse until the corpos eventually abandon your community. So you used to have a local grocer, then corpo drives them out of business, then corpo shutters the location for poor performance. Now you live in a food desert
The dream of all vampires is to keep you barely alive enough to be fed on. They go to extreme lengths to control the narrative around this so instead of seeing vampires actively trying to enthrall us we see them more as a friendly, convenient way to help make ends meet. But convincing us that shopping local is a burdensome act of charity is their first line of attack
Why do you even visit them? I’d say if you use them for product discovery but then give all your sales to online merchants, you are an absolute enemy of small businesses, whatever you think you feel about them.
Oh look, there’s a new store. Let’s see what they’re about. Oh damn, I can’t afford to pay that much for that.
Carpenter, plumber, electricians and similar tradesmen about half of them work for or run a small to medium business where I live.
Dentists, hairdressers, lawyers also come to mind.
There are a lot of machine shops that are small businesses too.
From personal experience. I am willing to assign a higher value to products made by local and/or small businesses, even if it doesn’t otherwise make any practical sense. But it is a very conscientious moral judgement on my end, so I don’t expect most people to behave this way… and I have a limit too, +100% is probably too much.
Although I guess the benefit of being a “small” business is that you also don’t need as many customers… There are also some types of small businesses that are competitive: I suppose most ethnic food stores or your local market stall won’t struggle with competing on price.
how is it that there are any little shops left at all?
Maybe this depends on the area? I don’t know if it is just me, but it seems to me that these days small businesses do better in larger cities… maybe larger cities have more “ethical shoppers”
Some local retail makes sense, and some does not. For example, my life would really suffer if the hardware store down the street closed up. I like being able to get a paint match home in under 30 minutes. And sometimes I spend half an hour looking for the exact bolt I need, checking it against the other part it’s going to screw into: you just can’t do all that on Amazon and the big box motherfuckers are further away and far less convenient.
Once I messed up and superglued a wrench into my palm. I couldn’t wait for fucking Prime Overnight. I went down to the hardware store and asked if they stocked ca glue debonder. They didn’t, but the store manager got out some acetone and sat there with me, slowly pouring it on as I peeled the wrench out. He wouldn’t even take my money at the end. You just cannot get that kind of service from Lowe’s or Amazon. I now buy every single thing I possibly can there, to help ensure they stay around. I drag my kids anytime I need to go there, and they’re allowed to raid the candy rack at the checkout.
The only small businesses I care of is when it comes to lawyers, psychologists, doctors, car repair shops and other professions similar to them.
Call me a capitalist or whatever, but almost any other small business I go to shop in, their prices are absurd and somehow worse than the big-chain stores is. Their staff could either be some of the nicest people you meet, operated by a family or they can be the opposite where the family don’t know what the hell they’re doing and they try ripping you off and getting involved in their drama.
Lots of professional services are run out of small businesses - doctor’s offices, law firms, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, etc.
Some of these are under threat too. There are online lawyer and doctor offerings now. Maybe not plumbers, but there are certainly tech companies trying to own the plumbing referral business (like Thumbtack) and they suck a great deal of the profit margin out of it. Nothing is safe.
Fab shops & low volume manufacturing, tool & die, construction, cosmetology, IT services, consulting, accounting firms, non-profits…
True, but be careful, many of those you list appear to be small business because the big corporate owners have decided to have different name out front which makes it look like small business but they are not. You can tell because they are trying to sell you “services” that you don’t need.
I mean, “small business” can still get pretty big. You can bring in $40M with 1500 employees and still be clarified as “small”.
You can tell because they are trying to sell you “services” that you don’t need.
Show me a business that doesn’t. 😛
There’s plenty of gray area - franchises can be privately owned despite hosting a big brand logo, retailers can have boutique letterheads despite all being part of some corporate megalith (Laundry’s loves doing this shit), an office can be part of a group, a consultant can only have one or two clients and effectively operate as an off-book extension of the parent company, yadda yadda yadda.
But for the most part, the guy running the auto shop on the run down lot at the corner is independent. And you’ll know it when they go bankrupt in the next downturn, then get replaced by a Starbucks.
For me it’s usually niche things and like you mentioned, ethnic foods and local restaurants. There is a tea and coffee shop near me that sells locally roasted coffee, and a plethora of loose leaf teas. The farmers market when open is a great for produce and some nick knacks. We have a co-op that has a little market in it where I’ve purchased yarn and knitting supplies.
I don’t explicitly try to shop small stores or local, but a lot of the big box options have highlighted in recent years just how shitty they are, and I avoid those places as much as I can. I am financially stable, so I do have the luxury of being able to choose where I buy groceries without breaking the bank, and that’s not lost on me. I haven’t been to Target since they caved on DEI, Walmart just a few times in the last couple of years since sometimes it’s the only option, Amazon maybe twice for the same reason as Walmart.
It’s not been the easiest transition and in some cases it’s more expensive, but I’ve also cut some things like buying PepsiCo products regularly and not replacing with an alternative.
