I was struck on a recent Saturday morning, as I went to the station to go to London for the debate and vote about British Steel, by the length of the queue outside Sounds Records in Stroud.
It wasn’t even 8am, yet there were maybe 50 people patiently waiting in the morning sun. I was pretty tempted to join them (I love record shops), but the lure of Record Store Day wasn’t enough to divert me from the matter at hand.
But it did make me think, again, about the importance of doing everything we can to encourage people to spend their money locally, with local businesses and traders.
Not only do events like this help boost specialist local retailers, they are also really good for the local economy.
Roughly 63% of the money we spend at a local independent shop stays to be spent again locally. Spend the same amount with a chain, and the figure is reversed: 60+% leaves the local economy. Local shops and businesses are deeply embedded in our local communities, care about their localities and are actively involved in community activities. Shopping locally is better for the environment, and better for our health, especially our mental health. It is the stuff of everyday life, and it’s important.
Big online retailers and massive corporate companies do a good job trying to persuade us otherwise, but, taking everything into account, shopping locally is also generally cheaper, and the quality of service and products is better.
I’ve written before about the principal of community wealth building, which has done so much to benefit the towns and districts that embrace it: Preston, Islington, Newnham, and Clackmannanshire, for example. Simplistically, it is about the shop local ethos, but writ large. It’s about ensuring that big local institutions and businesses follow progressive procurement policies, supporting fair employment, making their financial power work locally, and ensuring the socially productive use of land and properties. But it’s also about what we do as individuals.
We might not think that where we do our shopping has the potential to help change the world, but it does. In unsettled times – and ours are currently very unsettled times – supporting our local economies helps mitigate the unpredictability of global markets.
It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of global uncertainty – but we can always do something.
