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Ossie Bladine: Wired to shop local

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Comments

tagup

While I agree wholeheartedly with benefits of shopping locally...a major obstacle in the past has been stores closing times.During the week, many, if not most, retail establishments are closed by the time potential customers have finished work and are ready to go shopping. Seems to me that a business that actually wants people to shop locally should be open at least until 9PM...especially during the holiday season. NW Food & Gift is one of the few 3rd street exceptions that actually tries encourage the later shopping crowd. Tough to shop local if the stores aren't open!

Michael

Recently while shopping a local store the young clerk talked about how convenient and easy it was to shop on line and there were special deals. I replied that I liked shopping at a local store, to look at and handle the product, and I liked that if I bought something there the young clerk would get a paycheck. Eyes widened in recognition. "Yes. I will." But I'm from another time, before convenience of the internet shopping existed. For some items, on line shopping is great, but for most things that are available locally the value is as you say in community.
And to extend what tagup pointed out, local businesses have tough competition from that on line convenient smorgasbord of things to buy. They have to provide hours and they have to provide that extra human service of knowing what they are selling and that smile that says thank you.

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