I really can’t afford to pick and choose where I shop, but when I can I try to shop at independent business. Especially when it comes to bookstores. They’re usually more helpful anyway; when I shop at Borders, most of the time my questions are met with a blank look.
I think about it a lot. I believe that I should do my best to support the community I live in, and that means shopping here, and buying from locally-owned businesses whenever possible.
I will shop at chains if they are the only local source for a product or if I have a serious problem with the competing local source (I don’t care if you’re local or not; I won’t tolerate bad service).
I will not shop at Wal-Mart because it’s such a hugely destructive force to our local economy.
I am disgusted by people who say they agree with me about Wal-Mart, but shop there anyway because it saves them a bit of money.
I have never purchased a dog or cat from a pet shop (every dog I’ve owned has been a pound puppy or came from an individual who couldn’t keep it). I have purchased a fair number of fish from pet shops, though.
My town has a serious dearth of independent stores. That was true before Wal-mart, et al, came to town. If you couldn’t find a store, then you had to go to the next town. but basically? I go for convenience and price and lack of pokey, dusty, ill-kempt-ness that a lot of small business around here seem to have.
OK, but… if an independent store is bright, clean, and has good customer service - would you go for a few cents price break at the MegaStore instead?
(REALLY want to make sure you know I am not picking on you - I have a few friends that own small stores and I’m always working with them to help sales. I want to let them know what works!)
Hijack, but I’m curious, and I have to get my city thrills vicariously through others! 
Which ones do you go to locally? I seem to remember a lot of them closing down when I lived in Lakeview/Boystown, but I always went to the below-ground one at Corneila and Broadway.
Sorry to say…I shop wherever offers the lowest price. I’m not sure why people castigate Wal-Mart for being a tightly-run supply chain contained in a superb business model. It’s cheap, and I buy my sundries there.
If I’m buying something like a gift, I almost always patronize a local shop, as I find that they have odd, less-widespread gifts.
-Cem
Selection, convenience, prices, and quality of service is all that matters to me. That a company is locally owned or a small business have never been compelling reasons for me to shop there. Either a business can attract customers on its merits and succeeds, or cannot attract customers and fails.
I woudl shop at a locally-owned store if I knew I was going to get rock-solid service, and general friendliness. Call me nostalgic, but I always wanted a Mayberry-type experience, where I get a “Hi, Cemetery!” as I walked in, or at least a smile and a wave. I would forgo a few bucks for that on a consistent level. Come to think of it, I use a local True Value for tools and home fix-it stuff becuase they’re super-friendly, and seem OVERstaffed sometimes (and they’re not pushy). I’ve bought a snowblower there, a lawnmower, 2 hoses, sprinklers, and lots and lots of lawn-waste bags.
I think that’s the way for locally-owner sotres to compete against the Big Boxes.
-Cem
I don’t mind pet stores that sell fish. I might not buy anything from them if the fish tanks were really dirty and nasty, but then again I probably wouldn’t want to shop in any store that was visibly dirtier or a lot uglier than most stores of the same type.
I have similar gratitude toward Starbucks, Borders, and Barnes & Noble.
Before I discovered Starbucks, I didn’t know of any coffee shops around where I was. I’m grateful to them for showing me that there was something better than diner coffee, and for making it easier to get decent coffee even in areas where most people don’t seem to care about coffee.
Before I discovered Borders/Barnes & Noble, the local bookstores I had been to were sucky mall bookstores. Borders and Barnes & Noble may be chains, like mall bookstores, but at least they have a much better selection. And again, they made it easier to find a decent selection of books even in places where most of the locals don’t care.
I’ll go to a local coffee shop or bookstore if it’s convenient, clean, pleasant to be in, has decent service, and isn’t too much more expensive than the chains, but I won’t make a point of staying away from Starbucks or Borders/B&N, because my life got better when they came into my area.
I’m not sure I buy that “chains are bad for the local economy”, anyway. AIUI, the franchise system can make it easier for someone to start and run their own store or restaurant. They get help from the national chain on what kind of food to serve or merchandise to sell, as well as advertising from the national chain instead of having to do their own. I could see how it could make things a lot easier for a novice store or restaurant owner. All those chain stores have to be run by somebody local and have to employ local people, after all…
I don’t like the fact that they seem to go out of their way to avoid offering benefits like health insurance to employees, and to keep employee pay low. They seem to me to be more willing than other companies to use their clout to do those things.
On a more local level, I don’t really like what Wal-Mart is doing at a mall near where my parents live, either. They moved their store into the mall. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the fact that they made the mall owners modify the mall so that there are no doors between the Wal-Mart and the rest of the mall- you have to go outside to go between them. I think they’re being selfish and petty, trying to make it as hard as possible for people who go to their store to go to any other store for something else.
I’m sure other people have other issues with Wal-Mart, but those are mine.
Those issues don’t really have anything to do with their being a chain. I wouldn’t like to shop at a small local business if I thought they were trying hard to deny benefits to their employees or trying to make shopping at competitors harder, either. I think those are scummy things to do, whether you’re Bob’s Local Store or Wal-Mart.
Some of it is supply chain efficiency, though they’ve totally screwed up their RFID initiative, so they’re not perfect. If that was the only savings, I’d be fine shopping there. However, their treatment of their employees has already been mentioned. You surely remember the scandal of people being locked in overnight? My local WalMart is a hellhole, and it is right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Other stores in the same complex are neat and clean, so the condition of the store is clearly the result of management decisions that a good shopping experience is less important than saving a few pennies. Then there is the cost pressure on their suppliers that leads to sweatshops and lead paint on toys. I’ll take target and CostCo any day.
I must admit, though, that the place being a pig sty makes it easy for me to reject them for moral principles. It might be harder if they were as nicely maintained as Target.
No Wal-Mart for reasons already mentioned.
No Home Depot for more personal reasons, but if I’m desperately seeking something and it’s getting late, I may break down and go there.
I shop at the store closest to me usually. If there is one only a *little *farther away and it is cheaper, I shop there.
The quickest way to find indy bookstores is the booksense.com Web site. It’s maintained by the American Booksellers Association, and they have a store finder by ZIP code.
Just to make my position clear, I don’t castigate Wal-Mart. I castigate the people that live around here that shop at Wal-Mart. My reasons are all about community. If you’re a big-city dweller, you can afford to ignore the concept of community. In a small town, you can’t. If you live in rural Montana and shop at Wal-Mart, then you’re hurting our local economy.
If you like living in this town, then support the town; don’t drive an hour to Wal-Mart to ship your money off to Arkansas.
I think about it a lot. I thought about it before I met my husband, and it’s a big thing for him, so now I think about it even more. He was a small farmer (just to be clear: he isn’t small, the farm is) for years and now works at a locally-owned business in a small town. His livelihood has been made in small business, and supporting others is important to him.
As for saving money – which is something I must do, since we don’t really make very much of it – I’d rather spend a bit more on toilet paper, bananas, and Cheer and save money elsewhere (fewer clothes, and fewer dinners out, for example), if it means I don’t have to go to Wal-Mart (which I dislike for both political and personal reasons). And especially if it means that the next time I need Cheer, or diapers, or milk, the little store in my little town will still be there.
Really? When I worked at Wal-Mart as an overnight stocker I was making almost twice as much as I was as a shift supervisor at the coffee shop where I worked days. My brother works at a Wal-Mart now and has health benefits for his whole family and seems to make a pretty decent wage (he’s been there about a year and just got his benefits last month). Maybe the cashiers get paid a lot less, but cashiers in general, in any store you shop at, even independent ones, generally get the short end of the salary stick. IME, it’s usually right at minimum wage, maybe a quarter or fifty cents higher if the cashier has prior money-handling experience or has been with the company for a while. If I recall correctly, the cashiers at the Wal-Mart here make around $7/hr, which is about the same as they would if they worked at the local independent health food store.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong; I’ve read plenty of news stories about how Wal-Mart forces employees to work unpaid overtime, is stingy with benefits, etc. But are their wages really any lower than the wages for the same jobs at similar stores? In my experience, they’ve been at least equal or higher, but usually higher.
On the converse, I would love to shop at Costco, since they pay their employees extremely well (I’ve heard they make an average of $17 per hour) and offer them great benefits too. Plus, they have really high-quality food products, and often better deals than the supermarkets. However, I live alone in an apartment, and just can’t justify spending $50 a year for the privilege of buying mega-quantities of everything. If money was no object, I’d join Costco in a moment – plus I like how they are a strong competitor against Sam’s Club/Wal-Mart.
I’ll also avoid Domino’s Pizza due to political and religious differences. And while I won’t shop at Wal-Mart for most of the aforementioned reasons, I did break down and buy some display shelves there after I checked Target, Michael’s, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and a few other places, and nobody else had anything close to what I needed.
I don’t have a car, so I shop at places that are within walking distance of my home or office.
I won’t even set foot in a Wal-Mart if I can help it, for all of the above reasons plus the fact that I used to work at one, and they treated me (and the rest of us) like crap. I truly should have sued, I had grounds, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly at that point and just wanted out of that hellhole. I don’t want to support a company that goes out of its way to treat employees like that. (I know not everybody has horror stories about them. A lot depends on the individual store management.)
I’ve somehow landed in an oddity of a small town that has some serious money and virtually no chain stores of any kind, but due to said money has lots of nice small stores. I can’t afford a lot of them, though. The closest grocery store is a local chain that has three stores, one in the town I’m in and one in each of the next two down the road. My bank is similar; I went with the local bank because I’ve always been happier with smaller ones. There’s an Albertson’s in the next town, which I do some of my grocery shopping at, but most of my money ends up staying right here. Everybody here makes occasional trips to the nearest big town with the chains because sometimes you just can’t find stuff up here; in fact, I’m going to make such a trip tomorrow or Sunday. But a whole lot less of my money goes out of town, let alone out of state, and I rather like that.
This is an extremely atypical small town, though. I got lucky.
I largely shop at any store that has the goods I like, a nice store, good customer service, and reasonable prices. I don’t agree that chain stores in general and Wal-Mart in specific are anything other than a positive for the economy, so I shop there frequently, but I also go to independent stores if they have all of the above and are more convenient.
But I don’t go to Starbucks - because their coffee is terrible. Coffee Beanery has the good stuff.
We do think about where we shop, but oftentimes it comes down to choosing between the lesser of evils.
I almost never do Wal-Mart as a matter of principle, though it took me a long time to knock it off because the stuff is way cheaper there than anywhere else.
I have almost completely stopped shopping at Meijers, because I hate Meijers, I hate that half of their checkouts are now automated. I fucking hate how big stores have 20 checkout lanes but only willing to keep like 2 cashiers on at a time. So now Meijers is waiting in line for 20 minutes because they are too cheap to employ actual people. And the cashiers bag their own groceries now–that’s more waiting and more stress on the cashier. I just stare at all those automated machines and wonder how many people were laid off because of them. It’s a shameless ploy to save money in labor costs and foist the inconvenience on the customer at the same time, and frankly it disgusts me.
We get our groceries at what is probably a chain store (Hillers?) but the food is organic and the place has more of a local/labor-oriented feel. Barring Hillers, we use Trader Joe’s.
And we use BP Gas whenever possible because of its support of same-sex benefits for its employees. It’s still a fucking oil company, but, you know, lesser of the evils.
I still buy Coke though.
Shilling for Costco I’ve found it worthwhile just for their cheaper prices on eggs and dairy (eggs are sold in 18-packs), plus laundry soap, razor blades, and other things that don’t go bad. The eggs/dairy might not be useful to you if you don’t use a lot of them, but other stuff like batteries and drugstore things might make it worth signing up. YMMV.
And they have fantastic business practices, too.
I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at Costco, and usually do the rest at independent, interesting stores. There’s a lot of ethnic supermarkets here. I think I’ve only been in a Wal-Mart twice, both times with my MIL, who loves them.