The United States of Generica

     Instead of the beating heart of the beast, they found a mirror and stood there staring at their own reflections. The old man smiled. “You are the heart of Walmart,” he told them. He explained that Walmart couldn’t be successful without “you,” the consumer.

    I must admit, I cringed when I saw that show. Talk about throwing it back in our face. The inconvenient truth is that if we don’t like Walmart or any other discount retailers encroaching on our communities and driving out our long-time local businesses, we are the ones who must do something about it. It’s up to us, individually and collectively. We’re not victims. As long as we see ourselves as victims we will feel powerless and throw up our hands as our communities are stolen from us. As soon as we decide to take our collective power back we will be unstoppable. The fact is that it simply cannot happen without our consent and our participation. Bill McKibben, in his book, Deep Economy, said this: “For Walmart to prosper, we must think of ourselves as individuals—must think that being individuals is the better deal . . . think of yourself as a member of a community, and you’ll get a better deal. You’ll live in a world with some hope of ecological stability, where the chances increase that you’ll be happy. You may not have quite as many small appliances, because they may cost a few dollars more, but you’ll be happier.”

    Let’s sum up how long-term thinking and shopping locally go hand in hand: First, shopping locally keeps dollars in our neighborhoods. Local businesses help create and sustain the character of our towns and communities—those quirks and special features that make our towns unique and special, not just knock-offs of every town around ours.

    Generally speaking, you’ll get better service from local businesses. They understand their customers’ needs and wants, and have a stake in keeping good relationships with the public.
    Small, local businesses are, collectively, the largest employer in the nation, and account for the lion’s share of job growth. Local businesses are far less likely to pull up stakes and take their business and jobs elsewhere.
    A wide variety of small businesses create more choice of products than homogenized chain stores.

    As we have just seen, shopping locally helps the environment, helping keep down congestion, habitat loss, pollution, and sprawl.
    Local businesses tend to support local non-profits. In fact, non-profits received an average of 350 percent more support from local businesses than they do from non-local businesses.
    Local, downtown businesses need less infrastructure and have less need for large outlays of public services. And, as we’ve seen, local businesses are run by people with an investment in the community. They have a stake in the towns in which they do business, and they tend to make decisions with that in mind.

    And finally, a study in Austin, Texas, showed that if each household redirected $100 of their spending over the holidays to local businesses, the local economic impact in just that area would be in the tens of millions of dollars.

    It’s truly up to us. We cannot wait for corporations to do the right thing. They simply won’t. They are under a legal mandate to do whatever it takes to increase profits to their shareholders, no matter the cost to communities or the planet or individual lives. If the CEOs of these corporations do not do everything in their power to increase profits, they can be sued by shareholders and removed from their position. It’s up to us. No matter how large the problem seems, or how insignificant our efforts may seem in the short run, over the long run, if we stick together, we can shift the dominant economic paradigm from one of greed, power, and profit, to one of balance, fairness, and a mindset of making decisions for the common good, and long-term best interest of all.