Localism

A friend over at Coming Home just started her New Year’s resolution: to shop only at locally owned stores for one year. It’s an ambitious project, and she’s started a blog about it. It’s sort of ironic, though, that because we live in Northwest Arkansas, Wal-Mart is actually a locally  owned store. But she won’t shop there; read her first post for her explanation – one that I totally agree with.

In discussing this project with her and some other friends, it brought up what a difference people can have in their shopping habits. When she was a child, Coming Home’s author shopped with her family and they used major credit cards for those non-essential shopping trips (like, for clothes).

For me, who was a child in the ’70s, I went shopping with my grandparents. We shopped at chain stores, but there were so many different ones: OTASCO, TG&Y, Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, and yes, Wal-Mart (before it became the Evil Empire). My grandparents didn’t have a major credit card, but they had a store card for just about every department store that offered them.

As for me, I had a major credit card (as well as a Sear’s card) years ago, but had to get rid of it when I declared bankruptcy back in 2001 (due to medical bills).

So I guess my  point is that it’s interesting that a decision about where to shop can lead into so many related issues, such as how we shop, and of course, why we shop. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country that shop as a sort of recreational pastime, and I just can’t get my  head around that. To me, shopping is what you do when you need something that you can’t otherwise borrow or find in a dumpster. As a kid, we didn’t go shopping for clothes every fall – we only bought clothes or shoes when the ones we owned were literally falling apart.

So hop on over and give Coming Home a read, and maybe it will inspire you to think about shopping in your own way.