Natural Harvest: Trying at buying LOCAL... and Inderpentent

Buying local is better for the environment using less energy to transport food and good from the shop to your house and if you choose locally grown and manufactured products from your local shop you are not only helping yourself use less energy but also the business and the people they buy from.

Buying from your local shops helps to strengthen the local economy. Every time you buy something from a shop your money gets divided, most of the money goes into paying for the replacement of the item you just bought and the rest pays for power, phone, water, gas, packaging, wages, maintenance, Ink, sometimes advertising and a little left over to invest back into the business.

If the local business you buy from also gets some of their stock from other local businesses then the support multiplies and local businesses have a soft spot of others of their kind (trust me, I know).

A local business becomes a big part of the community with your local butchers, bakers and green grocer’s feeding you. Hardware and nursery’s helping you to build and maintain your house and garden. Hairdressers keeping you looking your prettist and the list goes on…

Many sports clubs are sponsored by shops from the surrounding area allowing them to in turn support other shops for sausage sizzles, uniforms and more.

In this day and age with “The Big Boys” rubbing their ads of how they have the lowest prices it is easy to think that the “do” but in many cases it is only the items on special which are cheapest and everything else get a big mark up, after all they are the ones who have the million dollar rents, advertisements and transport costs.

Sadly local stores could be cheaper (not their fault) but with the monopoly in full swing it has led to price hikes behind the scenes. Take this example that I know for a fact, there was a type of item which is used to seal things it is called a tube of A. A was bought from three different companies 1, 2 and 3, these companies used to send their representatives to the hardware to get us to buy their tubes of A and we would let each of them know how much the other was selling them for and purchase the cheapest. But company 1 got greedy and wanted to get rid of company 2 and 3

So company 1 bought company 2 but left it called company 2 and made its prices higher so less people would buy their tube of A with the money they got from the loyal buyers or company 2 they then bought company 3 which allowed them to increase the prices of all the tubes of A including company 1’s and laying off representatives having no competition and I feel the government should have stepped in before this could happen.

On a final note if smaller businesses did have more customers they would have a higher turnover and would be able to lower their prices not having to fear if next month they might not get enough turnover to pay the bills.