Purchasing on Main Street
The local stores help keep our money in the economy
by Anne Pyburn Craig
Wherever you live in the Mid-Hudson, you’re within an hour or so of at
least one downtown zone with indie retailers. Wandering one or more of these on
an autumn afternoon looking for unique treats for the people you love and
finishing up with a nice bite to eat or a drink is a blast; you’ll be reminded
all over again of why the Hudson Valley keeps winning all those awards and
being “discovered” over and over. From Phoenicia to Beacon, retail is practiced
as an art.
According to the US Department of Labor, every square foot that a local
firm occupies brings the local economy $179 versus $105 for a chain store.
Communities with thriving downtowns see a solid gain in property values. And
the jobs created when local businesses thrive tend to be life-enhancing in ways
that being an “associate” in a mega-corporation could never be.
Re>Think Local—a nonprofit collaborative of locally owned independent
businesses, artists, farmers and nonprofits—is surveying indie business owners
in an attempt to get a clearer picture of just what kind of impact they’re
having on our local economy, and the results should be interesting. “We don’t
know the Hudson Valley statistics yet, but we do know if people spend their
money at locally owned independent businesses those dollars will circulate 300%
more before they leave the community,” says executive director Ajax Greene.
That’s just part of what Re>Think describes as the “triple bottom line” of
social, environmental and economic benefits that communities reap when local
businesses thrive.
Anecdotal evidence that the Hudson Valley is doing better at this than
many places is easy to find. Portals like VISITvortex.com and
HudsonValleyGoodStuff.com list dozens upon dozens of businesses and have
thousands of Facebook friends and website hits. “I get six to eight thousand
visitors a month and have 3,800 followers on Facebook,” says Vanessa Ahern, who
started Hudson Valley Good Stuff in 2009 by blogging about her favorite local
places. “I think interest in shopping local has grown since I moved up here in
2003. It’s helped along by events like First Fridays in Saugerties and
Woodstock Nights, when local businesses come together with special events and
strive to make shopping a wonderful experience.”
Saugerties, although it has long supported antique shops and a few
special places like Krause’s Chocolates, would hardly have qualified as a
shopping mecca a few years ago. “When I first came here there was a lot of
turnover, a lot of vacant storefronts,” says Daisy Kramer Bolle, a
second-generation indie shop owner and proprietress of DIG boutique. “Then when
HITS started doing horse shows here and Diamond Mills Hotel and Tavern opened
up, it was a huge boost to the local economy. It’s wonderful to have the kind
of critical mass where local merchants themselves also shop locally, putting
food on each other’s tables.”
To thrive locally, it helps to think globally. “We do sell online and on
Amazon,” says Bolle, “and we ship to lots of people who discovered us as
tourists. I have customers who insist that they can’t find the level of service
and quality we offer in all of New York City—objectively, that can’t be the
literal truth. But we do strive really hard to make every woman who comes in
feel fabulous. We build relationships and keep the customers in mind when
buying. It’s about pursuing every avenue and hopefully it pays off. Making it
through the winter months as a small local business is no joke.”
Elizabeth Bloom opened Soiled Doves about seven years ago in Rosendale,
selling “addictively curated junk.” Her sense of style, honed over a 30-year
career in design, has won her a faithful core of customers. Despite a complete
lack of conventional advertising (Bloom is as likely to post “cat show” videos
of her furry roomies as pictures of her latest wares) Soiled Doves has been a
hit from the start, and Bloom seems mildly surprised to find herself becoming a
job creator—she’s considering an assistant to keep the shop open more.
“I got a great response from the get-go,” says Bloom. “My hours are
wildly irregular, and it’s all been word of mouth and people just stumbling
over me. I only buy stuff I absolutely love, and something about my taste seems
to resonate with the 20- to 40-year-old demographic.”
Resonant taste and creative place making are important—both Saugerties
and Rosendale have managed to hang onto their local theaters, as have Woodstock
and Rhinebeck; studies have identified an independent downtown theater as a key
factor in a Main Street’s success—along with the grit and passion of
entrepreneurs like Bolle and Bloom. “Do what you love and spell luck w-o-r-k,”
is Bloom’s advice to aspiring shopkeepers.
Such success stories may not be hard to find in our neighborhood, but
neither are areas that are still struggling with a plague of empty storefronts.
At the macro level, there is much work to be done to build well-rounded and
vibrant economies. According to a study cited by independentwestand.org: “If
independent businesses regained their 1990 market shares, it would create
200,000 new small businesses, generate nearly $300 billion in revenues, and
employ more than 1.6 million American workers.”
Working against this desirable outcome are entrenched structural factors.
“We need a national campaign for a level playing field,” noted researcher Stacy
Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Governments provide
billions of dollars a year in subsidies and tax advantages for the biggest
companies. Most people have only a dim idea of the degree to which this goes
on. They assume that local businesses are failing because they can’t compete,
but, to a large extent, it’s because the game is rigged.”
Part of the explanation for the Hudson Valley’s relative strength may be
found in the ongoing efforts of big-picture folks like Mid Hudson Pattern for
Progress, a nonprofit that’s been working since 1965 to study and enhance
interwoven factors such as government efficiency, education, and housing
solutions. According to March Gallagher, who recently joined MHPfP as deputy to
its president and CEO, shopping locally happens at the business-to-business
level too—a key factor in keeping dollars in town. “Our chambers of commerce do
a great job at their level,” she says. “When it comes to major public
investments in areas like semiconductors, it can be hard to measure or tell
what is being locally sourced—but it’s more than most people realize, because
we have a lot of supply chain vendors that worked with IBM and Kodak. We toured
Global Foundries (a semiconductor company that’s expanding its Saratoga County
manufacturing operations) with a group of local CEOs, and people were saying,
‘Hey, that’s our equipment!’ There are things being sourced locally that people
aren’t aware of.”
Gallagher cites collaborations between businesses like Community
Playthings and Viking Industries and points to the formation of local food hubs
as the kind of thing that needs to happen more. She also says that the Fortune
500 and Main Street can and should work together: “Local independent suppliers
can find out about large government contracts, but a lot of private-sector
sourcing is driven by personal contact—networking. When you make the
connections personally and not coercively, good stuff can happen.”
With the holidays upon us, it’s the perfect time to get out and
celebrate the vibrancy that our area has managed to regain and retain. This
month and next, local shopkeepers will be spit-shined and working long hours to
offer you stunning service and creative selection—the kind of retail therapy
you just can’t get at the mall. Oh sure, you’ll miss all the fun of waiting in
endless lines and forgetting where you parked your car, and you probably won’t
get to witness fistfights over this year’s equivalent of Tickle Me Elmo. But
that seems a small price to pay for subverting the dominant paradigm and helping
keep the lights on.
While you’re gloating over how much your loved ones will enjoy the quirk
and quality of the genius-level gifts they’ll be getting, spare a thought for
the big-picture folks working to keep it growing. “We’re much more powerful as
citizens than we are as consumers,” says Mitchell. “Corporations know this,
which is why they are always talking about us and positioning us as consumers,
while weakening our authority as citizens. We need to reclaim our citizenship
and start advancing change not just in terms of buying locally or even
investing locally, but in joining with our friends and neighbors to remake
public policy.”
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 1:18 PM.
Filed under
buy local,
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