I was thinking today about getting new envelopes printed. In itself, it is a trivial matter. Since I bask in trivial matters, I was thinking about how we could have much cooler envelopes if the printing shop had more selection and options. Then in occurred to me that there are probably loads of good print shops that could produce our envelopes that would offer loads of options – they just aren’t on PEI. Not problem – I think I dealt with the local printer completely via email and phone anyhow.
Then the thought comes – as I’ve been programmed to think – I should probably keep my business local. Then – out of nowhere – another thought: why? Why is it any better for me to spend my money in the town or region where I live than in any other town or region? I’m sure there’s a printing company in Chicoutimi (randomly selected town that I don’t live in) who would love to have our business (and may offer a cooler selection of envelopes).
At my business we don’t expect people to go with us because we are ‘from here’. We are also glad that our clients don’t ‘shop local’ – since many of them are not from this fair Isle.
I know there’s an environmental cost of shipping goods unnecessarily. But doesn’t that only apply to things whose raw materials are produced locally? For example, if I buy my turnip from Uzbekistan (randomly selected county that I don’t live in and whose existence have only discovered recently) then I cause an unnecessary plane trip that pumps all kinds of bad stuff into the atmosphere when I could have just grown the turnips in my backyard or bought them from my neighbour. However, when it comes to goods where the raw materials come from elsewhere, does it even matter? I mean, the local print shop is probably getting the envelopes from Malaysia anyhow.
It seems that you only want people where you live to buy local. If our clients did it, we’d be out of business. I learned in philosophy 101 that a good way to test a concept is to see if it applies universally. This doesn’t.
I suppose it has a lot to do with which groups and regions you associate yourself with. I’m from Charlottetown, I’m from Prince Edward Island, and I’m from Canada. Trouble is, I don’t really identify myself with any of those groups in any strong way. I’m glad I live in a country where you don’t get shot at and you can think what you want – but it was just dumb luck (or a cruel and vengeful god, for the religious types) that I was born here and some poor chap was born in Somalia. I don’t feel any more connected to the guy at the local print shop than I would do the print shop in Chicoutimi (again, randomly selected).
So tell me, why should I buy local?
I think you should buy what is good locally but that if there is something better…buy it where ever it comes from. Buying crap because it is local is fundamentally foolish – it encourages poor standards and destroys the local economy’s ability to compete elsewhere. As what is “local” here in PEI is tiny (for example, Pugwash is apparently “elsewhere” to certain people) the problem caused is infinately worse. But buying what is good and what competes or is unique is worthwhile. Everything comes from somewhere, some local town. Good things do come from the Maritimes [sorry – my microscope did not come with higher resolution than that] – good unique art, good interesting food, good friendly services. Hunt those things out and support them: Garrison ales, cape breton fiddling, malpeque oysters, annapolis valley gravenstien apples, David Adams Richards books, newfoundland stuff generally. But so much does not: no good suits come from here, few asphalt shingles and little furniture. few thai dipping sauces. Little by the way of a decent port. All this being said, mostly when folks say “buy locally” they mean buy goods made anywhere from local retailers. This does not stir the soul. Not when any old local shops anywhere stiff local suppliers and cuts loose local workers without compensation while ensuring the flip to the family trust got through in time. Buy from good local people – the tailor on Queen Street, the Harp and Thistle, the corner store at South Rustico, Carrs Seafood in Stanley Bridge. I spend extra to keep these kinds of places going. CDs, lps, hobbie stuff, RRSPs, brewing supplies, books…they all come in the mail after I buy them through this screen I am looking at right now…that is my “other local”.
Steve,
I think part of the reason you don’t see the need to buy local is because you “don’t really identify myself with any of those groups in any strong way.” And I think that’s a shame. Why don’t you identify yourself with the Island? You live here, you work here even if your clients aren’t from here, and you are (knowingly or not) affected by your suroundings.
It seems to me that by encouraging local commerce we push them to grow and get better. Why can’t Alan get a good suit made on the Island? That makes no sense at all. Islanders wear clothes. We can make good jam. Why can’t we make a good suit?
I don’t buy nearly all my products on the Island, but I do enjoy it when I can. Buying something made here, by people I might know, makes me feel good. Especially around Christmas time. I might order a book “from away” for my girlfriend who lives on the Island, but I really enjoy sending something that is made here to people “from away”.
By buying local we support each other and help each other grow. I know of one person who told me today that they called their National Office in Toronto to point out with pride the Island company who’s Intranet was named best of 2001. The National Office replied, “You have somebody that good on the Island?” Might be that your next client “from away” found you because of a local friend you didn’t know you had.
1. Is it possible to buy all you need in population units of 140,000 or is a greater population required to provide cars, computers, socks, wine, a variety of ideas? I think it is too small a grouping to expect one can even call it that kind of essential “here” as opposed to a “there” if you have become aware of the similarities and attractions of what is “there”…but that is just me as you know…
2. Is the lack of “home” love of the province or Canada an error or valid? Whether you place your self as of this province (example Charlie) of the Maritimes (example me) or of no place (Steve), is that decision reviewable on a validity scale? I think it is just a subjective feeling.
3. Is the question of supporting “local” not tied to your definition of locality. I buy Ontario wine when a good one is available at a good price – like in Sackville NB. I like to buy books of good Maritime poetry to both support and enjoy. I like Maine. All reminds me of me and where I like to call “here”. It is too relative to personal experience to be either corrected upon or the base for an economy – unless you induce disincentives to go anywhere else like a punative bridge toll and an encouraged xenophobic/isolationist culture.
You ask why. Truth is you’ve given all, or nearly all, the reasons why. Transportation, supporting the local economy, etc…
When the local economy is doing well then you do well; not only because they will shop at your shop (which in this case probably does not apply to you) but you will have more choices. Imagine a booming Charlottetown economy. Imagine the demand for snazzy envelopes is at an all time high. Imagine a local company responding and getting really creative and coming up with stuff that you actually like.
Now imagine that everyone shops elsewhere whenever it’s at all convenient and does little to shop locally. No booming demand for much of anything and certainly not anything as quixotic as high-market envelopes — but, you’re still in the market for same and have to (MUST) shop elsewhere. Imagine!
Buy locally because you are part of an ecosystem, and ecosystems are mostly local. Or at least they’re more local than they are not local.
Our community — any community — is largely shaped by commerce. New buildings get built, old buildings get torn down, roads get paved, high-speed Internet gets installed, hospitals operate, wacky light shows get created, all because of businesses, and the taxes these businesses generate. Local businesses.
Now I’m as anti-business as the next guy, but right now this is the way it is. When, eventually, we shape our communities through consensus-based collectives, things will be different.
But right now, our strongest “vote” is with our dollar, and where we choose to paint those dollars can have a dramatic effect on the look and feel of our community.
If you care about design and aesthetics and the environment, then you can choose to spend at those local businesses that respect the [visual, aesthetic, cultural, spiritual] environment you prefer and in doing so you help to shape your community.
You can, of course, also choose to shape the community of Chicoutimi or Uzbekistan, but doing so will have little impact on your own environment, and as these places are at the far end of your ecosystem, such purchasing could be viewed as cross-ecosystem meddling (others might call it economic aid).
I buy my tea at the Formosa Tea House, my New Yorker and Tweel’s Gift Shop, my vegi-burgers at the Uncommon Grocer, my Volkswagens from Sherwood VW, my iBooks from the little mac shoppe because by doing so I say “I support the way you are doing business, I would like there to be more businesses like you, thank you for making my little town a better place.”
In my crazy mixed up view of the world, all of these choices combined are my ripples out into the Charlottetown ecosystem.
I buy my gasoline, when I can, from Clow’s General Store in Hampshire. I do this for the same reason: “Bobby,” I am saying with my dollar, “please keep on doing what you’re doing.” Clow’s is not part of my immediate ecosystem — but it’s close, a couple of ripples upstream.
When I buy potatoes, I buy PEI potatoes. As with Clow’s, my potato farming neighbours are further afield then Eddie’s Lunch, but they are still my neighbours, and what they do affects me more than what New Brunswick potato farmers do, and vice versa. If I buy PEI potatoes, and vote for governments that support the buffer zones and crop rotation, and so on, then I am part of the local PEI potato ecosystem too.
So, back to your original notion of buying envelopes: go to Action Press on Queen Street in Charlottetown.
Go to Action Press because they are a good bunch of people. Go to Action Press because some of the people who work there probably voted for your father. Go to Action Press because they choose to stay in downtown Charlottetown, and to improve a heritage building, and that makes your community a more beautiful place. Go to Action Press because they have done free printing work for the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, and that serves to preserve a small piece of your Island home. Go to Action Press because they have an incentive to do a good job for you because they know that if they don’t, you will tell your friends and neighbours, and that would be a Bad Thing for business (or, conversely, if they do a great job, that will be a Good Thing for business). Go to Action Press because having a good local printer makes it possible for all downtown, locally-based businesses to operate more productively.
As to “hey, I’ve Steve, a citizen of the world, not some parochial Islander,” well, that’s simply a lie.
Your business could not exist — could not have come into being — without the support and love and attention of your local friends, family, community, Island. You could not have created a successful business in Chicoutimi or Uzbekistan. You could not have created a successful business without your local ecosystem to support you.
And so if there is any reason to buy locally, is that you owe your local ecosystem a great debt of gratitude for that.
If we are going to talk economic realities, then the 50+% of the PEI economy which is federal transfer has to be taken into account too. If I buy from Indigo, I am keeping the people employed whose taxes pay for out PEI hospitals. Peter is right in that good local shops assist the local economy but it is only part of the story. The infrastructures we rely on in PEI are not primarily funded from PEI dollars.
Some good points Peter. You’re right, I am an Islander. I don’t buy my groceries on the Internet – I buy them at Sobeys. But I’m not sure I buy into the reasons you suggest supporting Action Press. Because they improve a heritage building? I could probably find a print company elsewhere that does the same and has no-lick envelopes. Because they may have voted for my father? Wrong ward 😉
Isn’t that like Island Tel saying ‘pay more for our services because we support the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade’? I actually did witness them saying this once as a defence for their web hosting pricing.
It sounds like, and you may or may not take issue with this, you should buy local to make your locale better. A region strives to export more than it imports. This can only happen at the expence of other regions. Should I support Charlottetown at the expense of Moncton and expect Moncton to support Charlottetown at their own expese?
But don’t neglect the fact that the idea of Prince Edward Island is central and important to the success of Canada. In other words, people living in large Upper Canadian cities, spending 3 hours in their car every day commuting to work, breathing in smog, etc. require the notion of a pastoral green oasis to the east, where times are simpler and the living easier, to be able to get up in the morning. This is, I think, our most important contribution to Canada. And Canadians are getting their money’s worth.
By the way, Steven, if you do buy your envelopes in Chicoutimi, here is some information you will find helpful in times of emergency:
Realize that it will probably take a little longer for these Chicoutimi-based services to kick in when your home or office is on fire here in Charlottetown, or your appendix has burst here in Charlottetown, or someone has stolen your car here in Charlottetown.
In response to both Peter and Charlie’s comments, let me clarify. I love Prince Edward Island. I have a great appartment for a reasonable price (rediculously cheap by the standards of any other region) in the heart of beautiful downtown Charlottetown.
I love to walk the waterfront. I love that it is safe here. I seldom lock my car. Note to would be thieves, you’ll find nothing of value in my car but photos of my insides (be warned – this is actually a link to photos of my insides).
I think I will now buy locally because I’m affraid the ambulance driver’s wife may work at Action Press when my appendix eventually fails and he will drop me in the river.
To Alan: you’re living in the economic past.. it USED to be that Ottawa kicked in over $0.50 on the PEI dollar but today the number is somewhere around $0.25, and when you consider “economic development” as a transfer payment, that’s less than Ontario!
Kevin – that is only transfer component in the provincial government budget of 1 billion you have described. Add transfer and health and CPP and OAP and UI and farmers and fisheries subsidies and subsidies and DVA and other federal workers like at Summerside and all the other fed. grants it is still (in terms of primary secondary and tercery spending) around 50% of the 3 billion dollar total economy. Happy to be proven wrong but that is what I understand the figures to be.
Peter – PEI is that daydream for some in Ontario but so is Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Algonquin, BC islands, their golf course, their cottage. PEI is neither unique or in any way singular as being the urbanites get away. It is also not nearly the dream get away for most urbanites – check total tourist figures in Canada. That some like it does not excuse unique and singular navel gaving, insularity and subsidization and forgetting that we owe alot more to the country than credit is given.
That all being said, I also love living here [though learning about the latent peticides in the aquifer this morning was unusually unsettling]. That does not mean – despite cultural pressures to the opposite – that you do not point out the wrongs and the gaps. It also should not mean that you compromise in your purchasing standards as either a business or privately to accomodate those who have compromised their standards. By what is good and buy it here – where ever your here is.
that’s why we can’t have nice things…
just ask them to get in the fancy envelopes, for chrissakes. they’ll get them in and then they’ll be there for the next guy from whom plain old white envelopes don’t quite cut it. if they don’t bring ’em in — very unlikely, but possible — then call up Uparse Printing in Swilling-On-Tada in England and get your damn mohair envelopes. sometimes it’s fun to go away but there comes a time we choose to live somewhere. you can be a yahoo and n’er-do-well and scratch your nuts all night or you can be a mensch and muck in. [much more blah blah edited by me]
Oh, that’s no fun, Dave. Don’t be editing – though after sharing nut scratching as an Island attraction (and it is), one wonders what was left out.