12 BENEFITS TO SHOPPING LOCAL:
1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
Clarington's location, growing economy and competitive positioning make it a premiere business investment area. Active citizens, innovative entrepreneurs and large/small enterprises thrive. A growing manufacturing industry; a strong retail/wholesale service industry; agriculture; tourism; and, our energy focus ensure a diversified economy. First class health and education facilities, beautiful parks and trails, abundant amenities and safe community make Clarington a "captain of hospitality. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain The Municipality of Clarington’s diversity and distinctive flavor.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes. Local businesses are owned by people who live in the Municipality of Clarington, are less likely to leave, and are more invested in the community’s future.
3. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
4. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels Canada’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class. Entrepreneurs and skilled workers are more likely to invest and settle in communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character.
7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution. Also, local shops are more energy efficient than huge superstores.
9. Competition
A marketplace of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term
10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
11. Non-Profits Receive Greater Support
Non-profit organizations receive greater support from local business owners than they do from non-locally owned businesses.
12. Personal Service and Experience
Local shops offer a much more personal service than big box stores. Also, local businesses often hire people with more specific product expertise for better customer service.
