You shop, you vote. According to the business group Local First Chicago, every time you spend money via computer, phone, catalog, or physical store you’re helping to decide whether locally owned businesses will survive to keep their neighborhoods unique and prosperous.
She’d also like you to know that most of the Grind’s employees live in the neighborhood and walk to work. She buys her coffee from Intelligentsia on Fulton and her baked goods from Southport Bakery, Labriola Baking in Alsip, Sweet Thang on North Avenue, and other local suppliers. The Grind stickers on the cups? “From a guy on Lincoln,” she says. “My business cards are by a lady on Damen. Gethsemane Garden on Clark Street does our planter for the summer.” Clearly the $1.85 you fork over for a large coffee at the Grind is likely to be respent locally, making at least one more pass through Chicago’s economy before taking off for parts unknown.
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Everybody knows something about Starbucks. How many know about the Grind? Local First Chicago was founded last fall, and shortly before Christmas its 40 members began making their case in Lincoln Square, Andersonville, Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, and Bucktown–putting up window signs and door decals and distributing Local First Chicago literature and thank-you cards to customers, encouraging them to think about how they cast their dollar votes.
Any city business can pay to join Local First Chicago, provided it passes three tests. It must be privately owned (not publicly traded). More than half the owners must live within 25 miles of the business. And those owners must have the power to decide on the business’s name, look, products, suppliers, service providers, and distribution of profits.
Mainstream economics is all about letting money flow to whatever businesses can make a profit, whether they’re down the block or down in Argentina. The decision about whether a store “should” be in a given place is normally made by customers–not enough of them and pretty soon there’s no store. A formula retail ordinance–even one that covers only a few square blocks–takes that decision away from individual customers and turns it over to city hall or a neighborhood referendum. Experience has generally shown that in the long run this kind of protectionism leaves everyone a little worse off.
In any case, Michael Shuman is uncomfortable with formula retail ordinances and in The Small-Mart Revolution warns activists not to depend on them. “If you blow your political capital on erecting controversial zoning and trade barriers against businesses you detest,” he writes, “you’ll be ill-equipped to implement the policy reforms needed to level the playing field that currently tilts against small business,” such as ending city and state subsidies that go mainly to multinational corporations. He spends a third of his book explaining new ways to promote local stock markets, mutual funds that specialize in local independent businesses, producer cooperatives, and more.
Independent America
