'Shop Local' Campaigns about More Than Warm Fuzzies
In Andersonville, the chamber of commerce urging folks to live local and shop local is more than community boosterism.
It's the premise that the more you buy in your neighborhood the more money stays in your community, which, aside from all the warm fuzzies produced, also produces a measurable impact on a neighborhood's economic health.
I wrote an article this week for DNAinfo Chicago that profiled a retiring Andersonville businesswoman who embodies that idea.
My piece told the story of how she ran a business cooperative housing local entrepreneurs that served as a small business incubator and helped revitalize the area, which began as a small Swedish community and suffered from a period of divestment before becoming one of Chicago's trendiest 'hoods.
The article begins with a funny story about how the sweet but sharp old woman dealt with a national chain that expressed interest in occupying her shop once she retires.
A well-known "doughnut franchise" — Jan Baxter won't reveal which one — recently said it wanted to move into her Landmark of Andersonville shop after Baxter retires on Oct. 31. "Have you ever been to the Swedish Bakery?" was her curt rejection, she said, holding back laughter as she recalled the encounter last week.
Baxter, 74 with a short crop of white hair and a frequent smile, is a 49-year resident of Andersonville and fervent believer in its "Shop Local" mantra, and local leaders say she helped revitalize the business community in the 1980s.
"I want more than anything for Andersonville to continue to be locally owned, and not let big boxes or chains in," Baxter said. "All of us have done everything in our power to keep them out — right down to being rude."
A big box store or chain can be an economic boon for a neighborhood, bringing scores of jobs and putting more eyes and feet on the street — but small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy, both in Andersonville and in the rest of the country.
That's why advocates for local economies and researchers love Andersonville, with its robust and eclectic mix of small indie businesses.
Andersonville is one of 10 U.S. neighborhoods in the Indie Impact Study Series used by economic consultancy firm Civic Economics as an example of how local small businesses create "a virtuous cycle of local spending."
Small business owners often live in the same community as their establishments and have alliances with other local shopkeepers to buy goods and services, said the study. National chains, on the other hand, are usually more likely to purchase goods and services from outside of the local economy.
Researchers surveyed 13 locally owned, independent Andersonville businesses between November 2011 and October 2012, and asked them to open their books to show the proportion of revenue that flowed back to the community. Restaurants returned 73 percent of revenue while retailers returned about 47 percent of revenue to the local economy. In comparison, an analysis of national retailers and restaurant chains showed them returning about 14 and 30 percent respectively.
While Baxter impresses, her small business and its impact might not exist without help from her local community bank, which was just about the only entity willing to loan her startup cash.
As a staffer at the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce said earlier this year in an interview with me, "more than half of the nation's small business lending goes through community banks."
"They're really the ones who have been keeping the flow of credit going to local businesses. Because basically the big banks really aren't doing it anymore,” she said “By putting your money in a local bank, you are helping make it possible for that bank to lend out money to other local businesses."