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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.
...like mandatory auto insurance regulations of the 80s....
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.
I like to have local retailers around, so I don't mind paying the $7 extra as long as I can afford it. Never felt like property either.
Enjoy living in your desolate factory suburb then.
Believe it or not, to some of us, concepts like “community” are more than boxes to check off in Hipster Buzzword Bingo, they mean something identifiable and concrete. I want to live among businesses run by people I know, people who are accountable to the sensibilities of their particular customers, people who interact with the neighborhood they do business in beyond dreary gray spreadsheet transactions. I want to know where my stuff comes from and how it’s produced, and all of that’s worth a few extra bucks to me.
“Buy local” isn’t about guilt-tripping you into buying from a less-efficient-than-Amazon retailer, it’s about fostering values other than “the cheaper the better no matter what the external costs to society.”
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.
Exactly. All trade is local.
What do people think Amazon and Walmart do with their money?
Channel it though a string of offshore tax havens and shell companies to avoid paying tax?
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.
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.
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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.