By Jeffrey Bowen
As Thanksgiving is increasingly sold as “thanks getting,” and we are urged to get the ritualistic overeating of convenience foods out of the way so we can do more shopping, it is ever more important to support your locally owned businesses, bars and restaurants.
The owners of the tiny retail outlets that fill our older neighborhoods in recently rehabbed storefronts or reclaimed warehouses are your friends and neighbors. Their children go to school with yours. They pay taxes without loopholes and abatements. They aren’t contributing to lower wages, back room land deals, outsourced construction projects and watershed pollution.
They hire local artists, musicians, actors and dancers as the folks who will serve you. Local craftspeople make much of the merchandise, and when it’s imported, it is more likely to come from fairly traded sources.
Local coffee shops sell cooperatively grown coffees and teas, served in compostable cups with fresh bakery from local producers who hire local bakers.
Local restaurants are using real food, fresh food, grown from heirloom seeds by real farmers, on real farms, without chemicals, right here in Ohio.
Local clubs are presenting local bands, and when they produce national acts, they forgo industry created “tribute bands” and hire the amazing artists who wrote the original songs.
This is our community, our ecology and our economy. We live here, work here, play here and raise our families here. The vintage stores have lovingly collected the very best of days gone by. The thrift stores sell recycled clothing to benefit veterans, folks with special needs, and the recovering. Local book stores are not warehouses but, rather, centers of learning, supporting dialogue and discovery and providing a venue for writers and musicians to tell stories and sing songs about the life that we share.
The big box stores are never convenient; they are not quick and easy, they are not the best deal, and they are not cheap. The deep discounts are based on inferior products, designed obsolescence, slave labor and environmental disaster. The corporate giants, who outsourced our jobs, have brought third world exploitation into our neighborhoods and our homes. Now they want us to start shopping on Thanksgiving Day, shop twenty-four-hours-a-day, and bring along some canned food to donate to their employees, who are paid so little that they can’t afford food of their own.
What we can’t afford — as a community, a neighborhood, a people — is to shop incessantly, hurriedly and frantically for overpriced manufactured gifts while ignoring the gifts that already exist in our own backyard.
So, please, fill the fridge with fresh food from the local market. Save some gas and take a walk in your own neighborhood. Enjoy a beer from a local brewery that you discovered while strolling one of the many city streets, which are filled with shops that are filled with life.
Fill the stockings with toys and trinkets made by local crafters. Give a scarf from the thrift shop; a sweater from the vintage store; tools from the recycling center; earrings from the pop-up shop; art from the holiday open house; books that have never been sold online; shirts by local designers; CDs from local bands; and things that are recycled, refurbished, or made by hand.
And while you’re at it, please lend a hand, to someone, anyone, who has less than you. Someone, perhaps, with three kids and no car, who spent last winter in a shelter on the near west side, and rides the bus to work, at a part time job, at a big box store. We can do — and be — so much more if we think with our hearts, make or give art, and spend our hard earned dollars at a locally owned store.
[Photo via Mac’s Backs]
Jeffrey Bowen’s writing has appeared in Art Crimes, Cool Cleveland, Doan Brook Watershed, EcoWatch, Elephant Journal, GreenCityBlueLake, Green Panda Press, Hessler Street Fair, Live Cleveland, Nonprofit Notes, Sun News, The City, Whiskey Island Magazine and various Habitat for Humanity publications. [Bio photo by Frank Szekely.]
One Response to “Don’t Just Buy Things – Shop with Heart”
Chuck Murray
Please let people know about our year round CSA program.