Conscious Choice: Casting Votes with Your Wallet

December 2006 | Art & Soul

Casting Votes with Your Wallet

Keeping dollars “local” is a vote for identity—and sustainability

One of the most visible of the many radical changes we’ve witnessed in the last half-century is the proliferation of homogenized chain retail in our urban, suburban and rural landscape. Globalization has hastened the centralization of everything from food to hardware to tax returns, making every city and town look and feel an awful lot like anywhere else. In his new book, The Small-Mart Revolution, How Local Businesses Are Beating The Global Competition, author and co-founder of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) Michael H. Shuman argues for localness with “an amalgam of thinking from the right, left and center.” The book gives advice to small businesspeople for competing with the big boys, as well as to everyday consumers on how to claim victories for sustainability and economic democracy—by using their wallets to make a positive economic difference in their communities.

By Michael H. Shuman

When you think about Small-Marts, the first things that come to mind are the mom-and-pops and neighborhood stores that have been struggling and disappearing in recent years. Through business tactics that have been, depending on your perspective, brilliant or ruthless, chain stores like Costco and major Internet retailers like Amazon have steamrolled almost every community’s homegrown businesses. Five supermarket chains sell 42 percent of all our groceries, Home Depot and Lowe’s account for 45 percent of hardware and building supplies, and Barnes & Noble and Borders control half of all bookstore sales.

The increasing visual and financial presence of these powerful chains on our streetscapes, however, can be misleading. Retail is just one of the many sectors that produce wealth for a community, typically representing only about seven percent of a local economy, and chain stores just half of that.

And since “place-based” businesses already make up more than half of a typical community’s economy, the Small-Mart Revolution, for the most part, means doing more of what we already know how to do pretty well.

Why should it matter exactly who owns a business? And why should we care whether a business serves local or global markets? After all, don’t all businesses contribute to a community’s well being, no matter what their ownership and no matter where their markets? Sure, nearly all kinds of businesses offer a community the benefits of jobs, tax dollars, charitable contributions and local economic stimulus. However, locally-owned firms deliver these benefits more reliably, more robustly and more sustainably than the non-local alternatives do.

Localizing Your Household

In the spirit of late-night talk shows, I’d like to suggest actions you can take to localize your community economy.

Drink Local and Stop Smoking

Localizing Potential: $700 per household per year

Bathtub gin, anyone? The $376 spent each year on alcohol is being increasingly localized through microbreweries and niche vineyards. As with other food products, local producers are ideally situated to apprehend local tastes and meet them with just the right products.

As for tobacco ($320), although small amounts can be grown in local greenhouses, maybe even in attics once outfitted by hippies for other mini-crops, tobacco depends intimately on very specific features of climate and soil. Obviously, the better solution is simply to quit. This has a number of secondary localization benefits, such as increasing your productivity at work and reducing the chances you’ll need exotic, non-local medical equipment to treat lung cancer.

Localize Car Services

Localizing Potential: $1,000 per household per year

Care for and feed your cars locally. Chances are that there are competitive local establishments in your community that provide these services. Who needs Midas Muffler or the Wal-Mart repair department? Use the local guys who, incidentally, provide some of the best-paying blue-collar jobs in town.

Use Local Health Care

Localizing Potential: $1,850 per household per year

US households spend an average of $2,350 per year for health care. About $1,850 of this goes to doctors, dentists, therapists, hospital staff and nursing home caretakers, all of whom are local or could be. The rest is for insurance and drugs. There are two elements of the healthcare establishment that are decidedly not local—high-tech equipment and prescription medications. The purveyors of medical instruments and drugs are among the largest companies in the world. Some degree of localization is possible if these items are bought through local retailers and if purchases are prioritized from national companies with locally owned suppliers. But the only real way to localize these expenditures is by making a long-overdue shift in US medicine from treatment to prevention. As Americans take better care of themselves through regular exercise, good nutrition, strong families, psychological support systems and healthy communities—all inherently local activities—they will have less need for non-local life-saving instruments and prescriptions.

Find Local Entertainment

Localizing Potential: $2,100 per household per year

The typical household spends $2,079 each year on “entertainment.” Entertainment, however, is increasingly under the control of global media conglomerates. The big challenge for every community is how to prevent mass culture from drowning out local culture. The more a community can unglue residents from their television sets and involve them in local music, dancehalls, film festivals, fairs and street parties, the more likely that community can succeed economically. Richard Florida argues that homegrown fun is a critical element in maintaining a “creative economy” and in attracting and retaining business talent.

Halve Auto Use

Localizing Potential: $2,450 per household

Purchasing readily available, high-efficiency vehicles can reduce average fuel costs by half or more. So can simply choosing to drive less by walking, biking, skateboarding, jogging, skating or rolling in your wheelchair. In a country facing epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes, where exercise is often getting up from the plush couch to change the channel without the remote, the use of one’s body to get around may be one of the most powerful tools to simultaneously improve the health of one’s self, one’s family and one’s community. Mass transit is another approach.

Localization Numbers

How difficult would it really be for each of us to take these steps? If consumers took these steps (and five others the author lists), and if government and business spenders followed suit, the place-based economy could expand to perhaps 70 or 80 percent of the total U.S. economy.

Unlike political elections, which are so rare and irrelevant that most eligible voters in this country have stopped participating, economic elections never stop. Everyone is always eligible to participate, even children. Every single day, every hour, every minute we are opening our wallets and casting our ballots.

Adapted from The Small-Mart Revolution, How Local Businesses are Beating The Global Competition, ©2006 Michael H. Shuman, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Available at independent bookstores and bkcurrents.com.

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