Why Shop Local?
Top Ten Reasons to Shop Local
We all know how fun it is to shop locally in West Coast, but there’s more to it:
1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
West Coast is unlike any other region in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain West Coast diversity and distinctive flavor.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned business build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.
3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. Keeping Rands in the Local Economy
Your Rands spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as
5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels
7. Public Benefits and Costs
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. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. 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.
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