Chances are you’ve seen or heard some sort of promotion about the value of shopping local – especially with so many of us in gift-buying mode now. Business improvement areas, chambers of commerce, and other organizations tell us when we buy from shops near home, we’re voting for our own community.
The logic is generally sound but our habits don’t change so easily. My work (and natural inclination) means I spend a lot of time in and around books. I use libraries extensively, but I buy books too. In that case, it’s easiest just to order them online. You get exactly what you want delivered right to where you are.
So, imagine you hear about Nassim Nicholas Taleb's newest title Antifragile and you decide you want to read a diplomacy-free account of how most of the world is wrong. You may stop by a couple of local bookstores to see if they have it. Often, they don’t because they couldn’t possibly stock all the wildly different titles you might request. You end up ordering the book online – or, if you’re really committed, you order it through the store and come back later to get it. Those extra steps have meant a real decline in local bookstores over the last decade. Most of us skip checking with a local bookstore.
If we really want to make shopping local the norm, the challenge is clear. We need less transaction efficiency thinking and more enjoyment efficiency thinking. The appeal must be to our enjoyment, the pleasure of a different scenario driven by an older cultural liturgy.
Imagine that you visit your local bookstore, owned and operated by someone who shares your love of books – something you know by having gone there many times and engaging in a human exchange with the owner, a common practice called a ‘conversation’ (ask someone born before 1990 about it). You come in asking for the new Taleb. Though the store doesn’t have it, the owner knows you well enough to suggest several other possible in-stock titles along that science and culture line. Because you’ve bought many books from the shopkeeper before and trust her sense of things, you sort through the options and end up with Aaron Tucker’s novel, Y: Oppenheimer, horseman of Los Alamos about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s thought life while developing the atomic bomb – no waiting or coming back or ordering. Of course, you could’ve just ordered Taleb (or done it on your phone standing in the store) but instead, a much more enriched human nudge provided a unique option.
This is a different logic, a different cultural liturgy. It’s more than a shop local slogan and doesn’t appeal to the low motivational power of guilt. Rather than having just what we want when we want it, we accept a limit in exchange for an insight offered through another person. Buying what a bookstore has, mediated through a knowledgeable bookstore keeper, is like being a locavore – eating what your area provides. You learn to appreciate how you can sustain yourself within a certain range, whether culinary or literary, and realize how much is available nearby.
If we want to see shopping local take deeper root, we need to accept some limitations as a gift – increasing our enjoyment of life by limiting our choice to what our street, community, or neighbourhood provides. It isn’t about policing our neighbours if a courier pulls up and drops off an Amazon parcel. Rather, we can enlarge our pathways to include the pleasure of the shops, the meetings, and the passing conversations that exist around us. Many such places have disappeared, but you can usually find some form of them around.
