Buy Local A Return to the Good Ole Days

(Editor's note: the following article was written by Susan Odum, CED program coordinator for University of Illinois Extension.)

In rural southernmost Illinois, we often hear the term “the good ole days.”  While the decade of reference may differ for each of us, the overall concept remains the same, a time we remember fondly generally centered on friends, family and community.

In “the good ole days” your local business district was the heart of your community and your first choice for buying needed goods and services.  It was home to a vibrant downtown with a variety of grocery stores, car dealerships, jewelry stores, clothing stores, restaurants, lumber yards and hardware stores scattered throughout. 

As local buying patterns continue to support the growth of big box retailers located in regional shopping destinations and online shopping continues to grow, many of the businesses in our downtowns and main streets throughout southernmost Illinois are faced with an uncertain future. 

As more and more dollars flow out of our community, fewer and fewer dollars will circulate locally to support our local business community, our local economy and local government services.  As this happens, fewer and fewer local businesses will remain and more of our rural communities will be destined to become the new “ghost towns” of southernmost Illinois.           

A June 2009 article in Time Magazine entitled Buying Local: How It Boosts the Economy gave the following comparison: “Money is like blood.  It needs to keep moving around to keep the economy going.  When it is spent elsewhere, it flows out, like a wound.”  While this is a good analogy to help us better understand how important the circulation of monies are to our community, unlike our body which is designed to remanufacture new blood to replace the amount we lose (or donate), money that flows out of our community into another cannot be remanufactured or replaced. 

While we can’t return to “the good ole days”, we can make a conscious decision to shop locally in support of our business community.  By focusing our future buying decisions on community PRIDE instead of PRICE, we can create a strong, sustainable, locally owned economy.  

We have pride in our local schools and sports teams, and if we want to turn this trend around we need to have the same attitude toward our local business community.  Plus, it just makes good business sense to invest in your community and keep your dollars working close to home. 

Each time we shop locally we are saying YES to a strong vibrant local economy and demonstrating that we value our community and its businesses.  Plus, when local businesses find success in our community, they stay and they thrive, which in turn attracts new business.        

As consumers, we have the power to shape the future of our community, so if you love your community; take pride in it and support it by buying local whenever possible. 

If each of us would make a commitment to purchase more things locally, we can start a trend that will create a win-win situation for us, the local business community, the local economy and our local governments, also known as “the good ole days.”