You were doing real well, serving your customers, staying involved in the community. Yours isn’t the biggest market, but you’re OK with that, and you have made a good living for your family through your store and it’s customers.
Then that big national chain opened a location down the street—Wal-Mart, Zone, those Irish guys, maybe all three. You felt it that first month, and you are seeing vehicles in their parking lot that belong to YOUR long-time customers, your neighbors. That’s tough to deal with, but you have no choice. And you do have an advantage—you’re the hometown team.
Why should your customers buy from your locally-owned business? Recent studies have tried to quantify the benefit:
· A study in Austin, Texas found that $100 spent at a local bookstore produced $45 in local economic activity, vs $13 at the Borders store (3 to 1).
· Nationwide, 33.6% of the revenue from national chains is reinvested into the community, vs 64.8% return from local businesses. (2009)
· A new Wal-Mart costs your county an average 150 jobs lost.
· Local Non-profit organizations average 250% more support from small business owners than they do from large businesses.
· Local businesses are usually located in-town, rather than on the outskirts.
· Local business owners are invested in the community, national chains seek to extract dollars from the community.
· Local businesses almost always use existing infrastructure, national chains demand added infrastructure
· Local business stock products based on local needs, not national statistics. How often have you sold product in high demand—tire chains, generators—when the national chain was completely out?
· You spend money locally on supplies and services, national chains bring in their own from out of state. All of them seek to minimize local expenses.
· Big companies often locate their headquarters offshore to avoid taxes.
· Your stock orders come to you in a small truck that travelled at most a few hundred miles. That National chain probably sent an 18-wheeler from 2 states away and burned hundreds of gallons of fuel.
This list could be several pages long, but you get the idea.
At the current rate independent retailers might soon be a thing of the past, just as independent jobbers are gone from the big cities. But there is another trend: a growing number of communities are rejecting chain stores. Does your community have a “Buy Local First” program? All over the country, smaller cities are organizing to protect local business and discourage Big Box retailers.
The bottom line is there are a lot of very good reasons your neighbors should be buying from you, even if you aren’t always the rock-bottom price. Our job is to communicate that better, and continue to give them the best service possible.
Good information can be found at www.newrules.org
