Still three weeks to shop local for Christmas!
December 11, 2020, 9:54 am
Your local businesses need you more than ever, and there is still time to shop local for Christmas!
And there are some great reasons to shop locally this Christmas season:
1. Shopping locally supports the wonderful people who run our local businesses, the wonderful people they employ, the wonderful people they donate to, and the wonderful people they support with their local taxes! One of the many benefits to having great businesses in your town, besides making your life more pleasant by enjoying the services of those stores and restaurants, is they carry much of the burden of taxation in small communities, making your life more affordable by keeping your property taxes lower than they would be otherwise.
2. Money spent locally has a compounding effect within the local economy. If you spend $100 locally it circulates on average seven times before leaving the community, so you are supporting more than one local business when you shop locally! When local businesses support one another, this effect is compounded.
3. Make a point of shopping locally this Christmas and you may discover that our local shops have more to offer than you realized! There are some amazing stores in all our local communities, from clothing and furniture to florists and jewelry to pharmacies that carry everything from toys to giftware in addition to pharmaceuticals, to hardware stores that carry a lot more than hardware, to dollar stores, to some great privately run liquor stores like the Downtown Liquor Store in Moosomin, Decker’s H20 and Spirits to Go in Rocanville and Best Cellars in Kipling, to gift and decor stores to specialty food retailers like the Crate House in Moosomin and Cornucopia Gardens, to art shops to fabric and quilting shops and many more!
4. Shopping locally means shopping safely this year. Staying within the local area, avoiding trips to the city, means you are doing yourself and your family and friends a favor by not travelling to areas where Covid-19 prevalence is higher. Your local businesses are working hard to keep you as safe as possible!
5. Your local businesses provide service second to none, and have adapted to find ways to serve you safely through the Covid-19 pandemic. Your local businesses are always just a phone call or a click away and are always happy to serve you. Manitoba businesses can usually help you over the phone and with curbside pickup due to the restrictions in Manitoba right now. In Saskatchewan our businesses are not operating under the same restrictions but can always help you over the phone, by email, through facebook or however you want to contact them. I have to admit Kara and I bought some electronics when we had to be in Regina for a day recently—we called Glasser’s and ordered a couple of items that will be under the Christmas tree this year.
6. Shop locally and you can win! You can shop at participating businesses to enter to win $15,000 to spend locally, or one of dozens of other prizes in the World Spectator’s $15,000 Christmas Giveaway! As well, in Moosomin the Chamber of Commerce is running its Countdown to Christmas Draw until December.
I could come up with 100 or so more reasons, but as we enter the last three weeks before Christmas, please remember the importance of shopping locally.
We are very, very lucky to have the stores we have in our local communities. There are some amazing stores in our communities for only one reason—because people support them.
Those local stores are there when you need them, their owners and managers are important parts of your community, they employ your friends and neighbors, they support your kids’ hockey team and figure skating fundraisers.
As you do your Christmas shopping, please support the businesses that support your community!
