It was getting down to the wire.
I was running out of time and options. I had to get that special something – a small gift – and my search was yielding nothing. At the time – the middle of last month – I happened to be travelling out of Toronto en route to my small home town and I sensed my gift-search mission was going to fail. Within the hour, I reached town and turned onto the main street. That’s when it hit me. Stores in town were still open. I dashed into one shop and bought some flowers, then into another for my card. Mission accomplished.
And I thought of Dorothy’s epilogue in The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”
The truth was, however, I hadn’t needed either Dorothy’s ruby slippers or Good Witch Glinda’s magic wand to get what I needed. Just a little common sense. Until I walked into the flower shop and and the card store, that evening, I hadn’t realized I had committed the age-old sin. I had assumed the only place to find what I need was to look outside town.
There once was a time when so much of what we consider essential products and services could only be found somewhere else – cars, appliances, furniture, clothing, books, hardware, gifts and a hundred different household services. But that vacuum has long since been filled by creative merchants taking the initiative to bring those necessities to our main streets.
And now may be the most important moment to remember that. At perhaps no other time in our history has there emerged such a strong need to support local enterprize. Few of us have the power to alter the big issues at stake in this economic climate. House prices, interest rates, investment portfolios and employment statistics – they all seem out of our hands. Not even banks and politicians can affect change that great overnight. As it often has, the true test of people’s fabric may ultimately come down to community. And when it comes to the economy, that current axiom may ultimately be the way.
“Think globally, act locally,” is the phrase that many environmentalists have used in recent years to motivate community action. The phrase actually originates in the social activist movement right after the First World War, when economies everywhere searched for a way to bounce back from four years of destruction and depression. Maybe it’s time to borrow its message and to encourage each other to “buy locally.”
Recently, I read with some dismay about a town resident’s disenchantment with a local merchant. The resident had chosen to buy a household appliance from a downtown store, rather than from one of the larger retail outlets. She even pointed out that her initiative would cost her a few dollars extra.
Nevertheless, she wanted to support the local business. She explained, however, that she was met with what she called a “snippy” attitude from the store operator. If her story was true, it illustrates that the need for local merchants to take the initiative too. A thriving local economy relies as much on downtown store operators cultivating business as it does on shoppers spending their dollars close to home.
When the idea of writing about “buying locally” in this week’s column occurred to me, I wondered if I had addressed this theme before. I checked my clippings file and I had. It was 1992. At the time, I had been searching for a particular kind of stationery, without any luck. I had mistakenly assumed I could only find it in the big box stores in Toronto.
“Not a problem,” the local merchant had told me. “I can order it for you.”
Just because we’re an hour from the heart of downtown Toronto, I wrote back then, doesn’t mean we’re cut off from civilization. Of course, the stationer could get the product for me. And I felt really embarrassed. My habit of buying merchandise in the city had not only proved my assumption incorrect, it had also deprived my town of some vital business, in times when every sale counted. As I recall, in response to my column and local merchants’ concern for the local economy, business groups in town initiated a billboard and shopping bag promotion:
“We’ve got what you want,” the slogan said.
Maybe it’s time to use a few tried-and-true methods to combat this recession. As consumers we need to shift our glance from the horizon to what’s right in front of us. And as merchants, we need to remember that every sale big or small is a step closer to a better bottom line.
