About the Choose Local Card

Why Shop Locally?

Why should I shop locally rather than at a big national chain? A dollar spent at a locally owned store is usually spent 6 to 15 times before it leaves the community. From $1.00, you create $5.00 to $14.00 in value within that community. Spend $1.00 at a national chain store, and 80% of it leaves town immediately. This info is from Tim Mitchell, first cited in E-magazine, article available through the Northwest Earth Institute's Choices for Sustainable Living course book. Thank you for supporting local businesses and contributing to a sustainable economy within our community!

Make a Difference

Your dollars do make a difference. Where you spend your hard earned money has a significant impact on your community. It can even affect your own employment. For every dollar you spend with a locally owned business seventy-percent of that dollar goes back into the local economy. When you spend a dollar at an out-of-state owned company over sixty-percent leaves the state. The more money that stays here, the better off we all are. When you show the Choose Local card you are stating that you support locally owned businesses. These businesses appreciate your support by providing you an instant benefit of reduced prices, or free upgrades, or some other offer. To find a Choose Local business on the MapClicks.com web site select the Choose Local logo. If you are in the neighborhood just look for the Choose Local decal in the window of a Choose Local business.

Benefits

• No Points to Collect
• No Waiting for Rewards
• Instant Offers
• Giveaways and Prizes
• Supports Local Businesses
• Keeps Money in Local Economy
• Support Your Community

Ten Reasons to Shop Local

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity

• Portland is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Portland's diversity and distinctive flavor.

2. Community Well-Being

• Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

3. Local Decision Making

• Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy

• Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

5. Job and Wages

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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Competition

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

10. 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.

Adapted and reprinted from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Disclaimer: ChooseLocal.com accepts no liability for offers, or discounts which are not honored by business members. Our Choose Local program provides the consumer information about a particular business member's offer and web site when available via links, our company accepts no liability for information disclosed on the business member's website. All offers will be governed by the laws of the State in which the member business is located.