"Buy Local" Shopping In Bellingham, WA
(B'ham, WA USA)
Buy Local
I found this interesting article written by Jon Sayer April 8,2008 on WesternFrontOnline.net.
I believe a lot of people can get confused about what "Buying Local" means and this article put a whole new light on my perspective and I thought it may help others.
He writes,
"Go into any small shop in Bellingham, WA, and you are likely to see a sticker on the window that reads "Buy Local".
The idea behind this campaign, run by Bellingham non-profit Sustainable Connections, is that if you buy what you need from local companies, the local economy will prosper.
That’s great. I’m all for it.
But I know a lot of other people are turned off by the idea of buying everything they own from small mom-and-pop stores.
I am talking about people whose purchasing decisions are mainly affected by TV commercials and not an esoteric need to support their community.
Well, my corporately owned friend, you are in luck.
You live in Washington, a state home to enough multi-national corporations to fill every crevice of your consumerist existence.
You can help the local economy without changing your lifestyle at all.
To start off, a hip young person like yourself is going to need a cell phone. Washington has not one, but two massive cell phone companies to choose from.
There’s T-Mobile, whose corporate offices fill four buildings that tower above the landscape of southern Bellevue.
If you sign up with them and aren’t satisfied, why not try AT&T Wireless out of Redmond?
Well, I suppose you could try them if you weren’t already in that two-year contract with T-Mobile.
Now, no food on this earth is cooler than pizza. Get your cheesy-sliced goodness from the world’s largest take-and-bake pizza chain, Papa Murphy’s, based out of Vancouver, Wash.
It’s time for you to print out an essay for school.
Where did you get your printer paper? You could do it for cheap and get paper made of trees from the Amazon (not the dot com variety, which is another local company from Seattle), but why not cut down trees in your own backyard? Get Weyerhaeuser paper!
You have to dress well, too.
There are dozens of small boutiques here in Bellingham, but they don’t have commercials on TV, now do they?
Why not support Bellevue-based Eddie Bauer or Kent-based REI?
You’re going to need a computer, right?
Well, you could get a computer with a decent operating system, such as Mac OS X or Linux.
But why do that when you can buy local? Get a computer with Microsoft's Windows Vista?
Nothing else symbolizes the ingenuity of our state better than Redmond-based Microsoft.
It was founded by two college drop-outs with a vision to change how people interacted with computers.
They succeeded in their endeavor.
I mean, almost no one had a reason to swear at a computer back in the 1970’s.
Now I do it every day.
And while you’re at it, why don’t you buy that computer from Issaquah-based Costco?
So-called cool people don’t have a monopoly on Washington corporations.
After all, the un-cool eventually make all the money as adults—or at least that’s what my mom told me in elementary school.
The nerd set has their fill of local companies to spend their money on.
Nintendo of America is in Redmond.
Halo players will be relieved to know that the game’s maker, Bungie, is in Kirkland.
Half Life and Counter-Strike players who raise their noses at Halo fans should know that Valve Corp. is in Bellevue.
No list of Washington geek companies would be complete without mentioning Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, makers of Dungeons and Dragons and Magic cards.
Lastly, you can get all of your groceries at Bellingham’s very own Haggen Food and Pharmacy, which also owns the Top Food and Drug chain.
The company’s Web site boasts that they are the largest independent grocery chain in the northwest.
Ever the innovators, Haggen was the first grocery store to have a Starbucks (guess where they’re from?) built right into the store in 1989, according to their Web site.
So there you go. No need to start shopping downtown Bellingham or in Fairhaven to support local businesses.
You can go to the mall like a normal person. That is what normal people do, right?
In all seriousness, the Buy Local campaign isn’t about multi-national corporations.
It’s about regular people supporting other regular people, not regular people supporting billionaires.
Nevertheless, there are some products and services a little mom-and-pop do not or cannot provide.
When you can’t buy small and local, you could at least buy big and local. At least they employ regular people."
