Think. Shop. Buy. Local

Last week I wrote about The 3/50 Project, a national grassroots movement dedicated to "saving the Brick & Mortars our nation is built on."

That’s right; I covered a fantastic, national Buy Local project and, in doing so, completely neglected the one at home. Can anyone say irony?

Thanks to readers’ comments, I was turned on to the Retail Merchants Association’s Think. Shop. Buy. Local campaign. The concept is pretty much the same. The idea is for Richmond shoppers to "pledge to THINK first of [the] local economy, SHOP first at … local businesses, and BUY first from local companies who give back so much, in so many ways, to my community."

The RMA’s Web site includes a list of participating retailers (which you can access here), but in looking at it, it got me thinking that supporting local businesses is about so much more than the local economy and being Green.

It’s also about jobs. Not just access to them, but the quality of them. And the quality of the job, I believe, is linked directly to the quality of the consumer experience.

As I read through the list of local businesses, I was thinking about a friend’s high school girl friend. She was a little crunchy granola and, when I described her to people, I would describe her as such, always adding, "You know, she works in a pet store."

I meant it knowingly.

She did work in a pet store and she struck me as just the type who would. She worked part time, after school, in a quaint little shop nestled in a strip mall near her home. She cleaned out bird feeders, stocked shelves, rang up purchases, and spent hours listening to stories about new kittens and puppies and helping customers pick out just the perfect collar.

She loved her job and she was good at it. And, since she had no intention of going to college, she was content to stay there. At least she was until it closed down, not too long after a few big-box pet stores moved into town.

Still, a pet store’s a pet store, right? So she marched herself down to the big-box and joined the ranks of Corporate Pet Store USA.

It didn’t take her long to realize that one pet store is not the same as the other. Whereas the independent pet store allowed her to infuse her job with a little personality and creativity, its corporate chain counterpart insisted on strict compliance to nationally mandated rules.

After all, the purpose of a national chain is to ensure that a consumer in Richmond has the exact same experience as one in Seattle, right?

Her job consisted of long shifts strapped to a register, efficiency being the goal; or whole days sweeping and cleaning the floors. Customer service, once her favorite part of the job, was now relegated to occasionally pointing out the dog food aisle. The most important part of the job, she once said, was providing shoppers with a consistent experience, not a good one.

And as a shopper at big-box stores, I have to say, it shows.

Certainly, one can have a negative customer service experience in any store, locally-owned or not, but it does seem that in big-box stores all over town, drone-like, apathetic, miserable service has become the norm.

Which, to me, is just one more good reason to shop locally.