there are department stores and online retailers selling for nearly half of the price you’re selling

How do you think they get prices that low? Does it bother you?

I am all in favour of being frugal and shopping by price, but you are missing some of the value proposition when you talk about local stores.

In theory, what you are getting when you buy from a local store is the entire brick and mortar experience. This includes a knowledgable sales person who can talk to you and answer a bunch of questions and give you perspective, maybe even an expert opinion. You get hands on service for things like wrapping or solving problems or putting stuff on hold. If it’s a bookstore, you get to browse and pull things off the shelf and look through them and touch the books . If it is a clothing store, you get to try things on.

Go ahead and shop online, but at some point, you will run into a wall where having an actual physical experience, with all of the building overhead and staffing, is really what you needed, but it doesn’t exist anymore because everybody bought from Jeff Bezos.

So part of the value proposition is a bit like tax. You invest in your community so that your community doesn’t suck. You get value out of it in that you get to live in a place that sucks less than a place that was sucked dry by Walmart.

I absolutely buy from national distributors to save money when I have to but I don’t insult people who don’t nor do I attack small business owners trying to stay afloat by making profit off margin. I think the opposite of your opinion is dumb, but I don’t think yours is any better.

Bookstores especially are the absolute worst. I’m not paying 39.99 full cover price of the latest Stephen King book at your local business when Amazon is selling it for 18.99.

Y u no use library? It’s free. Sure, you might have to wait a while. But again, free. Plus other free stuff. Movies, games, everything.

But, who paid for the library? I guarantee you it’s local residents and local businesses. The Amazons and the Targets and the Walmarts of the world are very, very much involved in avoiding taxes as much as possible, be it the overturned dark store loophole or asking for tax incremental financing districts to force communities to sacrifice their property taxes for the convenience of the Big Box Store, Inc.

Isn’t it funny how the newest local big-box store always causes property taxes to RISE instead of fall? Huh. Weird.

Your local business on Main St. is there for a reason. Let’s take your bookstore. That owner has faced Amazon, the pandemmer, rising utility costs, worker shortages, road construction, tax hikes, and several other things I’m not thinking of. But when the local soccer club needs a $25 gift card donated for a raffle and Amazon tells them to get bent (if they even reply at all) you know that local bookstore owner will still do it.

Why?

It’s pride in the local community. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s knowing that the dollars you just spent in that bookstore are going right back into your community one way or another. Amazon ain’t gonna build you a new playground if the old one is destroyed in a tornado (hell, they don’t even protect their own employees during a tornado!). Amazon ain’t gonna close shop for a week or weekend and pitch in on the build. Amazon isn’t going to build a customer relationship with you. Hell, even Amazon’s customer service agents are OOPS…ALL BOTS these days.

So yeah, the book you want costs extra, and you’re broke. In that case, get what you can for cheaper where you can get it. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Hell, go one step further and look for used. Why buy new at all?

But I know if I go to Pete at the local bookstore, he’ll be putting that money right back into the local economy.

I have a slightly different but adjacent issue with small businesses in my area, and I’ll give one specific example: There’s a local coffee place near me that has good quality coffee, interesting roasts, etc. that they clearly labor over. Prices are a little more than normal, but that’s fine with me given the product.

What’s beyond frustrating are the hours: Thursday to Saturday from 8 or 9am to 1pm. I can get maybe one coffee a week. I’d love to support you, but I need some hours that you’re actually fucking open.

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I agree. Should I upvote or downvote now?

Personally, I rarely even have the option to buy the things I want in a local business. They simply don’t have it. My local book store isn’t going to have obscure, expensive, foreign language books on specialty subjects. I also have good, expensive taste in plenty of other areas that stores don’t cater to. I pretty much NEED to buy at an online specialty retailer.

And yes, if they do have it, price certainly is a factor. I don’t mind spending say, 10-20 euros more to have an expensive item in hand that afternoon rather than wait a week. But I’m not going to pay more just to ‘support local business’.

If a store is doing poorly, usually they are to blame. If you don’t sell the products people want at a price they deem reasonable, well, why even exist?

This whole equation is very complicated. Price is not always king, even for a cheapskate like myself.

Sometimes I buy a few smaller things from my neighborhood hardware store because it saves me time over going to the big box store. Time is money too. 30 minutes to save $1 is not worth it. If I need a lot of stuff, I will only buy from a big box store and save a lot over my local hardware store. If the project is big enough I may even price shop between the big box stores. The vast majority of my dollars go to the retailer with the lower markup.

But. Once I bought a hacksaw at Walmart. I try pretty hard not to buy stuff from Walmart but when it is Sunday night at 8pm and I want my toilet to work on Monday morning, there are not many choices at all for where to buy a hacksaw. So wally world won because of their hours.

But in general, I agree. Paying a lot more just to buy local is not sustainable for most people.

I partially agree. It is stupid to pay more for no reason. But in my own experience, just because it’s locally owned doesn’t mean they don’t have deals. I wouldn’t pay MSRP for pretty much anything. Most retailers, corporate or mom’n’pop, tend to just go by MSRP. But there are tons of places that are dirt-fuckin-cheap if you actually look around. Especially when it comes to food and daily household goods.

Funnily, in my case the local book stores are all used book stores (well, there’s also the 1 bible store which literally just sells bibles), so they’re incredibly cheap. But you might not find the latest Stephen King there at all if no one has come in to sell/donate one, so it’s still not perfect.

It also only seems stupid when the only local businesses left after a corporate giant pushed everyone else out are some kind of niche specialty or constantly change because they cannot actually compete against prices and/or selection and stay in business.

The question is do you want that business to remain around? I buy things from the local hardware store because they have weird things in stock that I can get in 15 minutes if I need it. I want that business to stay around so I will pay a little extra even if I don’t need today’s thing now. As a kid I remember cheering when WalMart came in and ran several local business out of town - the ones that combined high prices with worse customer service (worse customer service than WalMart!) I say good riddance to.