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Teamster Advantage: Top 10 Reasons Why Shopping Locally is Important

Start saving today with Teamster Advantage — a members-only program, founded in November 2016, to stop the flow of taxpayer funds from leaving our communities when shoppers choose big business instead of locally owned operations.

Through partnerships with hundreds of local businesses, Teamster Advantage helps members shop locally while saving money, too, thanks to discounts offered for members only.

In addition to saving big, shopping locally through Teamster Advantage helps members build stronger communities! The following top ten reasons why shopping locally is important was originally published by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org), a national nonprofit organization working to strengthen independent businesses and local economies.

 

  1.  Local Character and Prosperity: In an increasingly homogenized world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.

 

  1.  Community Well-Being: Locally owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centers, linking neighbors in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.

 

  1. Local Decision-Making: Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

 

  1.  Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy: Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.

 

  1.  Job and Wages: Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.

 

  1.  Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

 

  1.  Public Benefits and Costs: Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

 

  1.  Environmental Sustainability: Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which, in turn, are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

 

  1.  Competition: A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

 

  1.  Product Diversity: A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

 

Support local business with Teamster Advantage, where community comes first — Visit TeamsterAdvantage.org for more!