Imagine a world with two neighboring towns, Fairfield and Ottumwa. Fairfield makes very high quality chairs, Ottumwa makes very good cheese. What would happen if the chair maker in Ottumwa asked everyone to “buy local,” and get their chairs from him instead of from Fairfield?
His arguments would be familiar:
- For every $100 you spend in my chair shop, $68 is returned to the community through taxes, payroll, and my own spending.
- If you don’t buy local chairs, we won’t have a local chair shop anymore.
- If everyone purchased local chairs we would keep all of our money in the community, which will make us all better off.
All of this is nonsense, and it’s not difficult to see why if we reduce the situation further. Imagine everyone took his advice and stopped trading cheese for chairs. Fairfield’s citizens would no longer have high quality cheese, and Ottumwa would no longer have high quality chairs. Both towns are worse off.
Imagine further that Ottumwa continues to successfully encourage local shopping and succeeds in supporting all of its local businesses. They have a guy who makes dull knives, they have another guy making okay vegetables, and myriad other citizens make everything the town needs. Now let’s compare them to Fairfield, which trades chairs for everything it needs. It trades with Iowa city to get sharp knives, and with Mt. Pleasant to get high quality meat. It gets everything it needs from other cities who also have an exemplary skill, be it knife making or chicken farming.
Ottumwa, whose citizens all buy locally produced products, enjoys only one high quality product — cheese. Fairfield, on the other hand, who’s citizens only produce chairs, enjoy high quality everything.
It is easy to imagine that keeping money close to home is a good idea, but if we remove the confusion of money from the situation and imagine we are simply trading goods with other towns, it is easy to see that when towns trade, everyone enjoys higher quality products at no cost to themselves. We have great chairs, you have great cheese, let’s share!
If trade is removed, each citizen in each town is worse off. The only benefactor of the buy local ideas are the crappy cheese maker in Fairfield or the uncomfy-chair maker in Ottumwa; they become rich when locals feel guilty about trading with their neighbors.
There is no benefit to “keeping money in the community.” The statement is absurd, akin to saying “keep chairs in the community,” which would be pointless. Trading chairs to other towns doesn’t hurt Fairfield residents. It isn’t as if there are a limited amount of chairs, and we must pass them around amongst ourselves in order to have a healthy economy. To the contrary, the more chairs that leave the community via trade, the better off all of us will be.
Additionally, the term “local” is subjective in nature. How far does one need to go before a product is not “local” anymore? Would it not make more sense to view the entire world as “local” and compare the value and quality of each product in that light, rather than believing that buying from your neighbor three doors away is better than buying from the one three blocks away?
Let’s go further with our simplistic example and imagine that our neighboring town, Batavia, has no skills and no products. Its workers are uneducated and there are no industries there. Everyone is living in huts and foraging for food. Fairfield’s chairs are the best in the area and that people in Chicago are traveling to purchase chairs from us. We need to produce more. What is the answer? We set up a chair factory in Batavia. Unfortunately everyone there wants to work in the chair factory, but none have skills, all need to be trained from scratch (high quality chair making is complicated, delicate work) and all of them virtually beg for a job instead of their continued foraging and dumpster diving.
The factory in Batavia helps the citizens there, and it helps the people in Chicago, who want better chairs, and it helps Fairfield, which is able to enjoy more and more high quality products when it trades away its chairs. Eventually, the low pay rates in Batavia will rise as workers there become skilled, save money, and move to thinking about making something of value instead of wasting their lives looking for food and shelter.
Buying products made in Batavia supports the Batavians, the Fairfield residents, and all residents of the entire surrounding area who wish to own Fairfield’s chairs. Without the Batavian factory, Batavians would forage for food, Fairfield would have less money, and the people of the surrounding area would have lower quality chairs.
Obviously this is a simplified example. Batavians being forced to work in horrible conditions, the pollution involved in transport, and other problems are not discussed in order to present an understanding of trade in its pure form. The complications of modern globalization are a topic for another day.
Lyric, you've reduced the question to absurdity. So let's look at the other end of the spectrum which is, unfortunately, where we actually are.
Imagine two towns, Fairfield and Qingpu, China. After millenniums of trade the two towns have become pretty good at what they produce (agriculture from Fairfield & clothing from Quingpu). An international trade and finance system has made it impossible to know if either town's products are used in the other. But let's assume that in the big soup of global interdependency that somehow the two towns benefit from the other in some way.
Are both towns better off? I'd say no. First, the pressures to be the cheapest supplier of clothing directly leads Quingpu to have some of the worst child labor practices in the world. See http://ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=57. Second, Quingpu — and other towns like it around the world — are dependent on an international system of trade, finance, transportation to deliver their daily agricultural bread. If anything disrupts that flow (weather, war, global financial meltdown) then Quingpu would be left to depend on their undeveloped, insufficient, agriculture supply and skills. Fairfield isn't much better off: if there was an interruption in the trade flow, we wouldn't have the ability to make the clothes we need. How long would it take for us to build up the skills to make enough shirts for our needs? Forget about how long it would take to grow the cotton.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as always.
The meltdown of the financial industry in the past year shows how fragile our international finance and trade system is. We are inadequately self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-sustainable for our every-day needs. Further, there are perfectly good products available from my neighbors here in Fairfield. Why would I pass them by to buy their competitor's product from Quingpu (available at WalMart)?
We need to take some large giant steps toward self-reliance, and Quingpu does too.
Lyric, you've reduced the question to absurdity. So let's look at the other end of the spectrum which is, unfortunately, where we actually are.
Imagine two towns, Fairfield and Qingpu, China. After millenniums of trade the two towns have become pretty good at what they produce (agriculture from Fairfield & clothing from Quingpu). An international trade and finance system has made it impossible to know if either town's products are used in the other. But let's assume that in the big soup of global interdependency that somehow the two towns benefit from the other in some way.
Are both towns better off? I'd say no. First, the pressures to be the cheapest supplier of clothing directly leads Quingpu to have some of the worst child labor practices in the world. See http://ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=57. Second, Quingpu — and other towns like it around the world — are dependent on an international system of trade, finance, transportation to deliver their daily agricultural bread. If anything disrupts that flow (weather, war, global financial meltdown) then Quingpu would be left to depend on their undeveloped, insufficient, agriculture supply and skills. Fairfield isn't much better off: if there was an interruption in the trade flow, we wouldn't have the ability to make the clothes we need. How long would it take for us to build up the skills to make enough shirts for our needs? Forget about how long it would take to grow the cotton.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as always.
The meltdown of the financial industry in the past year shows how fragile our international finance and trade system is. We are inadequately self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-sustainable for our every-day needs. Further, there are perfectly good products available from my neighbors here in Fairfield. Why would I pass them by to buy their competitor's product from Quingpu (available at WalMart)?
We need to take some large giant steps toward self-reliance, and Quingpu does too.
"Is buying local good for the community?" Yes!
The argument you provide against buying local is contrived, as egc52556 points out. Rather than dissect that, I'm going to focus on answering the question. I'm honestly am unsure whether you actually believe your position and have a sincere interest in questioning the economics of buying local, or is this just debate fodder. I am going to assume the former.
Q: Is buying local good for the community?
A:
1. Yes – buying FRESH local foods is good for everyone. It reduces the energy costs in transporting foods across the country and globe.
2. Yes – buying locally produced goods creates community. To me this is a very important issue. There's something lost when we buy goods from places like Walmart without any connection to the people who made those goods. On the other hand, I have rewarding relationships with people in this community my family buys from. It's a connection I value. And I am a more informed consumer than I am when I shop at Walmart or Subway (for example).
3. Yes – there is value in buying local. Buying local doesn't mean that you you cannot buy the fancy chair or good cheese that's made a couple towns over. The whole concept of buying local is to re-introduce local markets where they make sense. There is value in buying some locally produced and marketed goods, and promoting and educating people on that value is good for the community.
"Buying local doesn't mean that you you cannot buy the fancy chair or good cheese that's made a couple towns over. The whole concept of buying local is to re-introduce local markets where they make sense."
You said it best, Will. It's not buy ONLY local, it is – choose local when it makes sense. I feel blessed to live in Fairfield where we have increasing local "good cheese and chairs."
Interesting post– the Fairfield/Vedic City Mom's Group is in the middle of a conversation on this same topic. Timely conversation since most of us are about to choose where to spend a few hundred dollars on holiday gifts.
I like to buy local in part because it feels good. When I buy my eggs and cheese and produce from trusted local farmers, I trust that the animals are treated fairly and antibiotics and chemicals are kept to a minimum. When I buy holiday gifts from a new local business it feels good to know I'm supporting the innovation and hard work of my neighbors, and helping them to create local jobs and pay local taxes.
As the owners of a local retail business, I can say that being local helps keep my husband and I honest. We try our darndest to make sure our products and business practices are safe, non-toxic, sustainable, friendly, and fair. Partly because those practices support our personal values, of course, and also partly because if we acted otherwise, it wouldn't take long until word spread in this small town and the customers stopped showing up.
Just have to plug again: Saturday Indoor Market at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center pavillion. From 8:30 am to 3:00. Still great fall produce and lots of fun gift items!
Something I had not considered is the effect of sales tax. When we purchase cheese in Ottumwa, it is as if the government of Ottumwa takes a chunk (about 7%) of the cheese. We pay for the entire pound but only take home 15 ounces. If we buy it in FF, at least the chunk of cheese goes to feeding a worker building city roads.
However, the idea that buying something locally is good because it "keeps sales tax here" seems a little off to me. It's as if we are saying it is really good for us because when we buy a chair from our neighbor, the city takes one of the legs to build a park bench.
Lyricd asking where to get the goat cheese reminds me –
We have so many great options here but not everyone knows about them. I'd like a listing of all local things that are available here. A community bulletin board! I'd also like a complete list of all yoga/exercise classes in town. If these bulletin boards were frequently updated- what a great service that would be!
There is a Hometown Harvest guide that the Buy Fresh Buy Local chapter updates every year. It covers any food related local items and membership that gets someone listed is like $30 to cover printing. This guide includes: honey, cider, apples, meats, home baked dog treats, trees, and could be expanded.
The nice thing is it is printed for anyone to pick up and keep for reference. I use it all the time for caterings, etc.
I’ve been searching for this precise info on this subject for a long time.
Another way to look at this:
Take, for example, an airplane with two engines. The plane must be designed so that either engine can fly the plane alone. This is a redundant solution. However, if it takes BOTH engines to fly the plane — an interdependent solution — then the statistical likelihood of a failure is doubled.
egc52556,
You are correct. When we specialize in building chairs, we reduce the ability of our town to weather a disaster. Ottumwa will be better suited to go to war, and residents of Fairfield will live much better lives until the disaster strikes.
If war breaks out, however, Fairfield will quickly adapt (as the United States did during WW2) to change all of the factories into whatever is needed to defend the city.
I don't feel that the sacrifice Ottumwa makes is worth it. I think it is better to live a good life in Fairfield, building a network of trade to live longer and healthier lives, instead of preparing for disaster by building 50 engines on each airplane.
This is a useful discussion, and thank you all for it. it's helping me to think through the issues.
One thing not mentioned so far in the discussion above and below (i believe) is that buying local/regional should reduce our carbon footprint, and that is crucial. In the worst-case scenarios, we may be *forced* to be increasingly local/regional. So we may as well try to create a more resilient regional economy as soon as possible.
egc52556 – what's up with the negative rating? Are you causing trouble on other blogs?
LOL! Wow, you got roasted over there. You got -27 points on one reply, which honestly was a pretty obvious statement imo.
I reduced you to -25.
Speaking of cheese and chairs in particular, my most recent chair purchase was an awesome pair of vintage clamshell patio chairs from a local 2nd hand shop; a year ago I bought a gorgeous Danish modern chair from a local furniture consignment shop. And I can't get enough of the goat cheese I've been buying from a local farmer. Yes, we are blessed.
Yes, for such a small town there are a lot of local good-quaility/artisan products to choose from. I'm a bit of a big city snob (who moved to a small town) and don't impress easily, but in this area Fairfield does impress!
Missy, where do you get your goat cheese?
Indeed, coming from Denver by way of New York, I've always enjoyed a plethora or choices. Now I feel as if my primary choices are to buy Fairfield, or on the web. If I'm going to travel for miles to purchase something that can be purchased in Fairfield, that will support a local business, and keep sales tax here, then why wouldn't I? Even if I have to spend a little more, it just feels right. And if I can't get it here? Well, every major website ships here, many for free, so I'll be a little "greener" and feel ok about that too.
Missy,
Excellent point about the integrity of local businesses. The further we travel to get our products, the less oversight we able to place on the production. The factories in China abusing workers would never survive if it were in Batavia — no one would purchase their products if they could see the suffering happening with their own eyes.
Missy wrote: "I can say that being local helps keep my husband and I honest."
That's such an important statement. Separation between creators / sellers / buyers changes our whole attitude to the products.
Will,
I agree with you on all three points. However, when I really want an out of season avocado, I'm very happy that Hy-Vee has one from Mexico available.
I agree. We are lucky to have such quality products available to us locally. The main benefits of local production is the freshness of the product, community building, and quality control.
My objection is to a blanket understanding that buying locally produced commodities is somehow better for our community.
I agree about the avocado. I have met people who believe that foods should only be eaten in season and locally grown. I like that concept in theory, but I could never give up my daily morning banana.
Important and highly relevant to the question posed in this post – "is buying local good for the COMMUNITY?"
Great question. My vote is a resounding Y-E-S.
I get it from the Cultured Kitchen. I can share contact info with anyone who wants it.
What a fantastic idea! I may have in with the editor of this Fairfield Voice thing, so I'll mention it
Dawn, a comprehensive, all-inclusive list of every product and service available in Fairfield is a project I'm currently working on with a number of local organizations. The idea is that if you can get what you need locally, why go elsewhere? Making sure everyone knows what the can get locally and where they can get it is a big part of the whole "support your local economy" thing.
I don't know exactly when it will be ready, but you'll hear about it when it is.
I'm in the process of making that type of listing easy to do on this site. Maybe we can coordinate?
I would love a list like this! Could it include services like contractors, yard work, child care etc.? We've had such a hard time finding a decent mowing service, for instance. I'd also love to see comments on the businesses from people who have actually used and recommend particular services. Although on the other hand I'd hate to see the list turn into a slam-fest. It always makes me cringe when a local restaurant is reviewed on this site and I see lots of negative comments about it…
We'd certainly need to have the ability for user's to comment – that's become the norm in this new age of social media and crowd sourced data.
Having said that there are plenty of articles written on how businesses that embrace negative feedback are able to turn that into positive marketing. An upset customer who mouths their frustration to everyone online, is easy to turn into an example of great customer service by replying back with a solution or acknowledgment of their frustration.
And of course if someone is just simply being mean, we can moderate that comment (delete/edit). Or other customers/community-members can vote down the comment (or click the 'report' link'. You can see examples of these tools in the comments above.
I think it could work.
It seems like there are two different resources being proposed: One a list of products/services available locally, and the other people's comments. If they could be separated that would be great.
It would also help if the service/product providers could update their own info.
Excited to see what you all come up with — should be exciting!
Cool! Is there an online version?