WHY LOCAL MATTERS

Local Character and Prosperity

In an increasingly homogenized world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.

Community Well-Being

Locally owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centers, linking neighbors in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.

Local Decision-Making

Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who line in the community and who would feel the impacts of those decisions.

Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy

Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the locally economy, enriching the whole community.

Job and Wages

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

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.

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.

Environmental Sustainability

Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town-centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, air and water pollution.

Competition

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

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

Excerpted from 10 Reasons Why Vermont's Homegrown Economy Matters and 50 Proven Ways to Revive It. Written by Stacy Mitchell of The Institute for Local Self-Reliance and published by the Preservation Trust of Vermont.