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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
People have this odd conception that shopping local somehow is better for the economy, too. It's probably better for the local economy, in the same way that high interest rates on over-valued houses are better for banks: concentrates money in a certain place, in a way that's actually harmful economically but is good for a certain specific entity at the cost of everyone else.
Parable of the broken window again and again and again. In this case, you could buy a book for $19 locally; or you could buy that book for $8 on Amazon Kindle, and spend $11 at your local farmer's market. In the former case, "your community" is richer--where "your community" is a book store. In the latter case, *you* are richer: you have a book *and* you have food, for the same money as just the book; on top of that, the farmer's market has some of your money, instead of the book store having it.
If the book store goes away but the local farmer's market grows, tough beans for the book store. You don't need a local book store--everybody is getting their books cheaper on Amazon and it's the same shit. What you do need is fresh, locally-grown produce that hasn't been picked unripe, gassed, shipped across the entire country, etc. How do I know this? Because nobody's buying books locally and everyone's buying local produce, that's why the farmer's market got bigger and the book store went bankrupt! If you'd all just buy books locally and cut back on the farmer's market spending, a bunch of people would be sitting around reading their expensive books going, "Gee, I wish we could afford good quality fruits and vegetables and fresh meats from a local farmer's market, but we don't have one and I spend all my money on books..."
Looks ridiculous on a small scale, but when you build it out this is exactly what happens. Arbitrarily subsidizing businesses has a cost.
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