The City of New Orleans' Stay Local! initiative encourages people to act locally with regard to culture, commerce, and the environment. In June 2010 the unemployment rate in New Orleans was 8.2 percent, while the unemployment rates in Northeast Florida’s counties range from 9.6 to 15.4 percent. Is shopping local one of the solutions for economic sustainability and job creation?
Check out these reasons to shop locally from Stay Local! in New Orleans
1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
New Orleans is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain New Orleans’ diversity and distinctive flavor.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.
3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
Stay Local New Orleans: http://www.staylocal.org/facts/why/
Unemployment information: "New Orleans gained 1,700 jobs in June" The Times Picayune
http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2010/07/new_orleans_unemployment_rate_2.html
The New Orleans Stay Local initiative seems like an initiative that should be implemented during normal economic conditions and a must during a recession. Thus, it seems appropriate for such an initiative to be included in the public awareness component of an economic recovery plan for Northeast Florida. That is, assuming such a plan is actually developed and implemented.
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