Shopping | A Sunday Sentiment
The next time you need to buy stuff, do the planet, your neighbors, & the alarmingly growing rate of inequality a favor and exchange your sacred dollars with real humans making real things in your real life community.
In other words, SHOP LOCAL.
As a society, we’ve really worked ourselves into a pickle. Over the last 50 years, we’ve tripled down on designing a web of economic interdependence that compels us to buy buy buy.
But from whom, where, when?
In an era of constant corporate growth, replicating & consolidating, our favorite local shops & creators buckle under the weight of distant corporate facades.
Under the guise of minimum wage jobs & reliably consistent deals, our local $$'s enter the door of a chain only to line the pockets of an increasingly few hands of the worlds top 1%.
Pockets that walk well-beyond our zip codes.
Our downtowns castrate their historic creativity with the chains of stores found in every mall in every state.
This big boxing up of once-upon-a-time originality always betrays us in the end. The small shops we love die a slow & calculated death. The creativity we crave as we stroll around a corner fades when our dollars defend the franchised intruder.
This assassination of authenticity has a trigger pulled by two dangerously complicity partners -
The corporate box & the unconscious consumer.
As if bound within an economic cancer that compels growth at all costs, we homogenize our culture & white wash the colors of each & every community.
If you are a customer lining up in the street for the latest holiday fueled deal, consider restraint.
When your dollars are spent locally, they stay locally. With friends & families who spend them right back. In place of narrowly funneling $$ to the top, we spread it widely to the middle on down.
The safety found in big box sameness will consume us whole if we fail to fight back.
This Holiday Season, SHOP LOCAL, SHOP SMALL, SHOP WITH REAL LIVE HUMANS.
