Beyond the Bottom Line: The Decision to Buy Local

Why is it that chain stores look the same no matter where you go? A McDonalds Cashier from Toledo, Ohio could be teleported to a McDonalds in Temecula, CA and still work her shift. In any large corporate organization, you will find a high level of standardization, and, consequently, homogeneity.

This is because standardization is necessary any time a small group of people must manage a vastly larger group. Otherwise, the system would be too complex and nuanced for easy central control. There may be no way to quantify "Lucy," but "Cashier" can be abstracted to a tally on a spreadsheet. This is how to large national chains, a person becomes a management statistic, and "Davis" becomes a set of demographic data.

With standardization necessarily comes that all-too-familiar homogeneity. McDonalds, Target, and other large corporate chains don't look boring and lifeless because their designers are tasteless. They look that way because they must offer a bland aesthetic average that will allow the same store to fit in anywhere, not perfectly, but acceptably. A corporate manager in Bentonville, Arkansas has no time to learn about the cultural nuances of Davis before investing in a Walmart here; he's got stores in thousands of other cities to worry about. He may fleetingly observe our town in the abstract, by analyzing a spreadsheet about our demographics and one or two sentences about our more prominent characteristics, but the individuality and nuanced culture of our town would be lost on him. Because his organization is so large, and so few must manage so many, he will never know about our town, except as a statistical abstraction.

It's an effective structure; prices are generally lower, and service more consistent. But what do we lose when this frighteningly efficient model, this sort of outside colonization, transforms a town from Davis, California to Anytown, USA? We lose out economically; when we buy at a Walmart, our dollars go to support the employment of a manager in Bentonville rather than in Davis. This "outsourcing" also robs us of economic diversity; Hibbert lumber must locally employ accountants, lawyers, and other secondary professions, while national chains fill these roles with people employed far away. We lose out culturally; every generic chain store that replaces a locally originated and owned business is one more way that we lose our unique distinctness from other towns across the country. We lose out politically; in terms of power differential, national companies can afford to run at a loss to put local competitors out of business, punish us, fight our city council in court, and generally get their way over us. And, ultimately, we lose out because the financial stakeholders of a national business do not have to live in the town that their policies are affecting, or with the local consequences of actions that hurt our city and its social fabric.

When you hear someone say, "buy local," it's not mere parochial sentimentality. It's a practical ethos that is essential for preserving the local character of our town, the economic resilience of our city, and, ultimately, our viability as a community.