Local is as Local Does

The other day I was chatting to Peggy Stafford, owner of Stafford Tile & Stone and an advertiser in this magazine, when she told a story that stuck with me. Peggy described a visit from a close friend who was in the midst of a kitchen renovation. The friend showed up at Peggy’s shop, announced that she had found a deal on some tiles she liked online, and asked for help deciding which ones to buy. “She wasn’t trying to be rude or mean,” Peggy said. “It just literally hadn’t occurred to her that this hurts local businesses, and the whole community, too.” 

To me, this was an interesting anecdote because it illustrates a couple of things about the extent to which online shopping has become an unavoidably convenient fact of life. We buy everything and anything online, from the mundane (clothes, books, cleaning supplies); to the big ticket (airline tickets, cars, fridges); to the utterly bizarre (if you need a headband with attached mullet hair, a life-sized statue of bigfoot, or a vinyl wall decal of half an Asian businessperson, Amazon has you covered.) Half the time we buy this stuff while reading an online article about the theft of millions of people’s credit card data from some giant online retailer. According to the US Census Bureau’s retail report, eight-and-a-half percent of total US retail activity for the first quarter of 2017 took the form of e-commerce. That might not sound like a huge percentage until further down the report notes that total US retail activity for the first quarter was $1.25 trillion. With a “t”. And the fact that all these clothes and books and bigfoot statues show up on our doorsteps within twenty-four hours has come to seem perfectly reasonable, rather than the minor miracle of supply-chain management that it actually represents. How on earth the post office still manages to lose money when it has all this delivering to do is a mystery I would love someone to explain to me. 

All this e-retail’s impact on local small businesses doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone (except maybe Peggy’s home improvement friend). I buy as much stuff from Amazon as the next overscheduled computer-jockey member of modern society. The convenience is irresistible, the shipping is cheap or free, and so long as you buy out of state, there’s no sales tax to pay.

Which brings me to the second, and arguably more salient, part of Peggy’s point. Not paying sales tax on your purchases is lovely in one sense, but comes back to bite in another. In Louisiana, sales tax revenue goes into the general fund, meaning it pays for state and local things like police and fire departments, road repairs, public schools, parks, and recreational facilities—things we expect to enjoy as members of a civilized society. So, buy your life-sized bigfoot statue ($228) from Amazon and sure, you’ll pay no sales tax. But buy it through your favorite local purveyor of weird ephemera and you get to lug it home secure in the knowledge that you’ve just contributed twenty-two bucks to the general betterment of the community we all call home. You saved on shipping, too. Our US Census report lists total e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2017 as being a little more than $105 billion, ten percent of which would fund a lot of public schools and road repairs. As Peggy said, “Don’t shop online then come complaining about the potholes in your road. Amazon isn’t coming to fix them for you.” I’m guessing the streets of Silicon Valley might be in better shape than ours. 

It will come as no surprise that the publishers of a magazine like Country Roads would tend to be standard bearers for buying local. Not only does buying local nourish and preserve the distinctive cultural economy for which our region is famous the world over; it also ploughs the resources right back in here at home. That’s paying it forward in the form of a stronger local community. Come to think of it, that’s one thing that Amazon can’t sell you at any price.