Occupy Wall Street by Supporting Independent Merchants in Both your Local and Virtual Communities!

Significantly more money re-circulates in your community when you buy from locally owned, rather than nationally owned, businesses: More money stays in the community because locally owned businesses purchase from other local businesses, service providers, and farms. Purchasing locally helps grow other businesses as well as your community’s revenue base, making upgrades and improvements possible.

Here are ten good reasons to shop at independently owned businesses in your local community:

1. Studies show that for every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 stays in the local economy, creating jobs and expanding the city’s tax base. For every $100 spent at a national chain or franchise store, only $14 remains in the community.

2. Local businesses provide most new jobs: Small local businesses are the largest employer nationally, and in most communities provide the most new jobs to residents.

3. One-of-a-kind businesses are an integral part of a community’s distinctive character: The unique character of any town or region is what people love about it, and what tourists come to visit. Richard Moe, president of the National Historic Preservation Trust, says, “When people go on vacation they generally seek out destinations that offer them the sense of being someplace, not just anyplace.”

4. Local business owners invest in community: People who own local businesses live in the community, are less likely to leave, and are more invested in the community’s future.

5. Customer service is better: Local businesses often hire people with more specific product expertise for better customer service.

6. Competition and diversity lead to more choices: A marketplace of many small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long term. 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 customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

7. Local businesses have less environmental impact: Locally owned businesses can make more local purchases, requiring less transportation, and generally set up shop in town or city centers as opposed to developing on the fringe. This generally means contributing less to sprawl, congestion, habitat loss, and pollution.

Now think of the Addoway marketplace, or your facebook friends, or your networked blogs as a village. Where we shop, where we sell, and hang out—all of it makes our virtual village "home." One-of-a-kind, independent businesses are an integral part of what makes YOUR virtual village a great place to be!

More good reasons to shop from independently owned businesses in your virtual community.

1. On Addoway, the independent businesses are owned by people who are part of this community and are committed to investing in its future.

2. Studies have found that independent businesses contribute more than twice as much of their revenue to charitable causes as corporate chains do. And advocates of charitable causes find that independent business owners are generally much more accessible than executives of large corporations.

3. A marketplace of many small businesses helps to ensure more innovation and competition, and lower prices over the long term. Independent businesses, choosing products based on what their loyal customers need and desire, not a national sales plan, guarantees a more diverse range of product and service choices.

4. Independent business owners and employees often possess a level of expertise and a passion for the products they sell that is unmatched by employees and managers of national chains. They also tend to have a greater interest in getting to know their customers. Simply put, local owners and employees take a special pride in their trade.

5. 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.  The success of independent businesses provides real-life inspiration to our young people, proving that they can prosper on their own terms.

In an increasingly homogenized world, both virtual and local communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character are more likely to attract entrepreneurs and new investment. Addoway merchants place a high value on individuality and consider their homegrown enterprises a source of pride. Buying from locally-owned and operated  and independent online merchants, and not from big box stores, chains, and franchises, keeps more of our money circulating in our  local AND virtual communities.  This holiday season we can either invest in our own community or watch our money leave our community to work elsewhere to enrich others.

BE part of the solution. BE the change you wish to see in the world.

As part of the Alternative Market Movement, our goal at Oshun Spirit Earth Friendly Traders is to encourage individual awareness, and individual action by forming and participating in viable trade networks which provide alternatives from the diseased global economy currently in place... so that we may all share in abundance and prosperity.