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Ask Slashdot: Will You Shop Local Like President Obama, Or Online?
theodp writes "President Obama and his daughters headed to an indie bookstore last Saturday to promote shopping local. The White House did not disclose which books were bought, but author Lauren Oliver tweeted her delight after a White House photo showed her books Delirium and Pandemonium were among the 15 children's books purchased by the Obama family for Christmas gift-giving. While it made for a nice Small Business Saturday photo op, do you suppose the President paid much more for the books at the small indie bookshop than he might have at an online retailer like Amazon, where the hardcopy edition of Pandemonium is $10.15 (44% off the $17.99 list price) and the hardcopy edition of Delirium can be had for $10.47 (42% off the $17.99 list price)? Kindle Editions of the books are also available for $7.99. And with both titles eligible for free Amazon Prime shipping, the President could've saved on gasoline and Secret Service costs, too! So, will you be following the President's lead and shop local this holiday season, or is the siren song of online shopping convenience and savings too hard to resist?"
No. I'll use my own money. Oh wait. He'll use my money too.
Is this supposed to be a news story, or an excuse to get an Amazon advertisement on Slashdot? That summary only needed a © Amazon PR Department notice at the end.
But I'll bite anyway and offer this perspective: people generally know you can find better deals online; that's not a marvel concept. B&M stores simply can't compete with low overhead online warehouses dollar to dollar. But lower prices are not why people shop local. They shop local because of in-person browsing, personalized services, and loyalty to their community, probably in that order.
The way the summary was written, the question can be condensed to: "Will you spend more money at a local retailer, or less money and buy online"?
I'm all for supporting local retailers when they provide a valuable service - I visit my local library/store where I can chat to a librarian/store-clerk and get valuable feedback/information. But the article doesn't raise any of these issues. Instead, it focuses on the downsides of brick-and-mortar shopping, without raising any of the positives.
...like mandatory auto insurance regulations of the 80s....
Fuck that. I'll buy from the vendors offering the products I want at prices I agree to. This "buy local" horseshit is nothing but guilt-tripping. Customers aren't property, and if local retailers can't compete, then they shouldn't be in business.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I tried, but my local shop was all out of buggy whips.
And Twinkies.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Also, he's the prez, meaning he probably didn't pay jack squat at the local bookstore he graced with the honor of visiting and bringing free publicity to in the first place.
That would be worrying, as it's corruption. Or at least may be taken as such. As a president he can not leave any doubt about such things, no matter how minor the amount. He's not a celebrity like a pop singer or actor or whatever, who do promotions for a living, he's the president and as such different rules apply.
Local businesses are at the core of the community. They employ my neighbors and me*. They support local activities and charities. They pay local taxes. I like dealing with them face to face. All of those things and more are worth more to me than saving a few bucks online. I do buy online for things I can't find locally or maybe if the price difference is ridiculous.
* Actually I work for a medium sized multinational corp. but when I started it was a local business that eventually got bought out. We still are active locally.
I feel it's my economic duty to provide accurate and useful signals to the market, so my dollars go to the most efficient and cost effective source that meets my requirements for quality, selection, availability and price. If I need something immediately or I need to touch it before buying, I choose a local supplier offering those benefits. If I don't need those things, I select on the remaining criteria. To choose vendors on arbitrary 'feel good' sloganeering deprives me of the best value and deprives the, perhaps distant, vendor that worked hard to meet my mix of needs of the sale they deserve. It also sends false demand signals to local vendors. However these false signals only serve to distort the market temporarily but otherwise are pointless gestures that, in the long run, achieve nothing and help no one.
Amazon is fairly ubiquitous now, ditto Walmart, etc. Imho, one should avoid all these companies for numerous reasons. But how?
Enter the numerous Chinese online retailers. End consumers cannot shop at alibaba.com, but anyone can buy those large minimum orders and resell on ebay. One should therefore always search ebay when shopping.
In many product type, there are large scale specialized online retailers that ship direct from China, like dx.com. Now dx.com's prices aren't necessarily better than amazon's across the board, but they commonly obliterate more U.S. resellers when you find your way into some niche products, like electronics components. I always check prices there now as well. Yes, merchandise shipped from China takes bloody ages to arrive, plan ahead man.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Fuck that. I'll buy from the vendors offering the products I want at prices I agree to. This "buy local" horseshit is nothing but guilt-tripping. Customers aren't property, and if local retailers can't compete, then they shouldn't be in business.
-jcr
Whereas I prefer to shop from companies who actually contribute back to the local economy by paying their taxes and not stashing them away in tax havens. If companies have sociopathic policies I try to avoid them.
President Obama loves small businesses so much that he's driving them bankrupt with expensive mandatory health insurance regulations.
Funny how this is suddenly all Obama's fault. Last time I checked that law passed both the House and the Senate before he was allowed to sign it into law. And don't give me that shit about a Democrat majority, the GOP could have filibustered it into the dirt and they did not.
And fuck off when it comes to the budget, the Constitution flat out says it's up to Congress to figure that out, so I don't understand why you mental midgets keep calling it "Obama's Budget" or "Bush's Budget".
And for the record, if you'd bothered to pay ANY attention you'd know that Romney's version was the same exact fucking thing that Obama supported- mandatory insurance. So fuck you and whatever TV show pumps you information up your ass.
Shopping local - which doesn't mean shopping at Wal-Mart - isn't something (smart) poor people can really afford to do any more. The mass producers and "service providers" have been funneling so much of the material wealth in their direction - mere pennies each at a time but multiplied by hundreds of them and tens of millions of blood donors^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers - that when a person is poor there really isn't enough left after the aforementioned get their cuts to share with local mom-and-pop businesses, whose overhead is high and economy of scale very low and who need higher profit margins to justify what they're doing.
This is why poor people shop - and all too often also work* - at Wal-Mart. They don't have the option to shop local like Barack and Michelle.
* It's also worth noting that Wal-Mart KNOWS their employees are also customers: not only does Wal-Mart pay low wages and deliberately toy with hours to keep a third or more of its workforce part-time and ineligible for benefits, it also doesn't offer an employee discount. The end result is that Wal-Mart actually gets back as profit a portion of the low wages it pays its employees.
Umm... ACA doesn't kick in until you have at least 50 employees. To put that in perspective, assuming your store is open 16 hours per day, multiply the number of employees you want in the store at any given moment by 2.8 to compute the number of full-time-equivalent employees. So even a fairly large restaurant with ten or twelve people in it at any given moment still falls well below the 50-employee threshold where the ACA kicks in. A typical bookstore chain falls below the threshold until it has five or six locations....
No, fifty full-time-equivalent employees is just short of a Wal-Mart-sized store. If you're that big, you are not a small business. Period. You're a medium-sized business. You're bringing in at least three-quarters of a million dollars in profit annually just to cover the employee salaries alone, assuming you pay everyone minimum wage, not counting your contributions to FICA, location rent, business insurance, etc. A bookstore making a million bucks a year would have to sell five or six hundred books per day at typical markups to cover those sorts of costs. That's simply not a small business, and anyone who claims that the ACA is going to cause small businesses to go bankrupt is either ill-informed or deliberately distorting reality to promote an agenda.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fuck that. I'll buy from the vendors offering the products I want at prices I agree to. This "buy local" horseshit is nothing but guilt-tripping. Customers aren't property, and if local retailers can't compete, then they shouldn't be in business.
You need to take an economics class. Its not purely a guilt trip, there is also actual science and math behind spending locally. Sales and marketing people don't have to lie on those rare occasions when the truth is actually on their side. This is one of those. Spending locally can benefit you, or divert harm from you.
Where you spend your money has a multiplier effect on the community you are spending in. You can benefit your community or you can benefit someone else's. Which of the two do you think is more likely to return some benefit to you? Which of the two is more likely impact you when they have to raise property and other taxes as business revenues decline? Communities are a highly complex set of interdependencies. In the 1970s and 80s people didn't think it mattered where they shopped or where things were made. History proves them mistaken.
No, politicians at Obama's level are being scrutinized constantly and intensively, and are squeaky clean certainly where the small stuff is concerned becaused simple cost-benefit analysis says it's the strategic thing to do. 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant' at work.
You the proved the GP's point. The plant you refer to is not a small business.
BTW, everybody is covered in western Europe. Employers do not hire you part time to avoid their healthcare responsibilities as the responsibility is usually with government to provide care, or create a system of cheap insurance for care.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
In Europe, we all have health coverage. We don't have to decide between keeping a finger (that we got cut off through our own inattention in the manufacturing plant) and sending our kids to college, or eating this month.
And we spend less than half per capita what Americans spend on healthcare, partially because we have the bargaining power of an entire government, partially because we're not engaged in an all-out war between insurance providers (who make more money when they deny you care), healthcare providers (who raise their prices because they know they are going to get stiffed by the insurance company half the time) and the patients (who just hope that their treatment is covered on their plan).
Mandatory health insurance is the watered-down weenie policy. Single-payer is the way to go. Why the hell would you enter into a contract with ANY entity that has a vested interest in you dying as quickly as possible?
Went to a local hardware store (in business since the Civil War) to purchase bullet catches for a woodworking project since I knew that they carried Stanley brand, unlike the local True Value distributor which I was in on Sunday which carries National Hardware --- turns out that Stanley sold their hardware division to National Hardware, so the bullet catches were the same as the ones I'd rejected on Sunday, just in Stanley's black and yellow packaging.
Lowes and Home Depot don't bother w/ much small hardware, so no bullet catches at either when I checked on Sunday.
The only other choice locally (since the last nearby independent woodworking shop closed) is Woodcraft and their inexpensive bullet catches seem to be from the same Pacific Rim factor which makes them for National Hardware so that leaves Brusso catches (too expensive and I want surface mounted strike plates), so I had to order from Lee Valley in Canada (and order strike plates from D. Lawless).
I really regret my father selling his father's anvil --- looks like I'm going to have to take up metal-working to have nice hardware for my woodworking projects.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Uh, what ? Do you have even the vaguest idea of what employment traditions, standards and laws are like in Europe ?
Here's a hint: "secure jobs for life" isn't something you find right-wing free marketeers fighting for. That's because they're the guys who want employees who can be treated as a number and discarded at will whenever someone cheaper comes along.
You want secure, full-time jobs ? You need to put employees on an equal power footing with employers. The only way to do that on a wide scale is worker unions.
I did go out on Black Friday and did find a pair of beat around shoes for 70% off the normal price, but other than wine from a local vineyard, didn't find anything.
The same with almost every shopping trip, nothing to find. Since I'm not one of the herds of hippos roaming the country, stores refuse to carry clothes in my size. As I don't buy products made in China, that excludes just about every electronic device out there.
Even online the selections are meager. As a result, I have free cash flow and no debt because there's nothing to buy. Pretty soon I'll be relegated to wearing a toga and using chalk boards to communicate.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
" the GOP could have filibustered it into the dirt and they did not."
No, they couldn't. The legislation as it exists was passed was passed in two parts. One part was passed through the Senate in the brief period when the Senate had 60 members caucusing with the Democrats. Republicans did not have the votes to stop cloture. The second part was passed under reconciliation which does not require cloture but is limited in scope. That part was basically comprised of tweaks the House wanted to make to the Senate bill. Republicans couldn't do anything about either part of the legislation at the time it was passed.
Who needs foreign invaders? See Kelo...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
1) Mandatory auto insurance is up to each State; not the Federal government
2) Auto insurance is only mandatory of you have a car and drive it on the roads; which makes sense
3) Health insurance is now mandatory if you have a job; which makes absolutely no sense. A job has no direct relationship with personal health. Just goes to show how backwards our laws are. It is like the combination of social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage. They are all in place for the simple reason of getting people enough money to live. Why don't we just wipe those laws out and give people enough money to live?
If insurance companies had designed their business around the actuarial details for the whole population, they would have been able to offer a fair and reasonable product. Unfortunately, short of regulation that forced them to, they didn't do that. Now they will, because although the US has an enormous number of heartless, selfish fucks who are truly so stupid they don't understand that a healthy population is better for everyone, they're finally fading out into the minority, and we finally have a solution — admittedly poor, we'd be far better off without insurance companies at all — but many more people will be able to get healthcare, which is a step in the right direction.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But for Xmas things...I just point, click and ship. That makes it SO much easier for me to get my Xmas gifts bought and sent, especially since about 90% of the people I buy for are out of state.
I also appreciate not having to pay the outrageous sales tax locally...almost 10% here.
I buy most all of my large ticket items online...something that is about $2K...I save nearly $200 buying it locally due to no sales tax.
Of course, I will "surely" claim this on my EOY tax forms and pay my use tax....[rolls eyes]
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No, I don't get it.
A socialist can point to successful models of socialism. A libertarian can not point to successful models of no government. Your options are democracies of varying degrees of socialism, totalitarian regimes, or, as you put it, local control.
That's not a straw man argument.
BTW, local control doesn't mean no taxes. The warlords want their money too. Probably less likely to build roads with it though.
paintball
They go up. But it goes up just as much for that business owner's competition, and since people on the average should have more money in their pockets because of more people with health insurance, it should be roughly a wash, at least in the medium to long term.
Funny, that. The insurance companies kept telling everyone that if you required everyone to have insurance, the costs should go down. Instead, they're using it as an excuse to profit. And this is why for-profit healthcare is a bad idea. None of this would be happening if the Republicans had allowed the Democrats' original proposal to pass (single-payer with a public option). But no. They insisted on an individual mandate with for-profit insurance companies. And then immediately started campaigning against it. But I digress.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.