- Keep money in our community: Significantly more money re-circulates locally when purchases are made at locally owned businesses. Locally owned businesses purchase more often from other local businesses, service providers and farms and helps grow other local businesses.
- Support community groups: Non-profit organizations receive great support from local business owners.
- Keep our community unique: where we shop, where we eat and have fun – all of it makes our community home. Our one-of-a-kind businesses are an integral part of the distinctive character of this place. Our tourism businesses also benefit. When people go on vacation they generally seek out destinations that offer them the sense of being someplace, not just anyplace.
- Reduce environmental impact: Locally owned businesses can make more local purchases requiring less transportation generally contributing less to congestion and pollution.
- Create more good jobs: Small local businesses are out largest employers in our communities providing the most jobs to our residents.
- Get better service: Local businesses often hire people with a better understanding of the products they are selling and take more time to get to know customers.
- Invest in community: Local businesses are owned by people who live in our communities, and less likely to leave, and are more invested in our future.
- Put your taxes to good use: Local businesses require comparatively little infrastructure investment and make more efficient use of public services.
- Buy what you want, not what someone wants you to buy: A marketplace of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term. 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.
- Encourage local prosperity: A growing body of economic research shows that in an increasingly homogenized world, entrepreneurs and skilled workers are more likely to invest and settle in communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character.
