Serendipity & CityWorks (X)po

I had a great piece of luck yesterday as I was driving aimlessly around Roanoke. I’d spent much of the day checking on clients and dropping off samples of coffee at prospective businesses and I had pretty much decided to pack it in and head up the mountain to Floyd when fate, or awesomeness, or whatever you want to call it, stepped in. As I was steaming down 581 I got a phone call from the folks at the City Works Xpo, which is a terrific and exciting new conference being held at the newly renovated Market Building right smack in downtown Roanoke. The event is the first to be held in the newly excellent building and it features some amazing and truly ground breaking speakers.

The Xpo is focused on a subject close to my heart – the idea of place-making and cultural change in small cities and towns. There are some amazing things that are possible in small cities and small towns that could never happen in large urban centers. Why? And how can entrepreneurs, legislators, and citizens take advantage of the possibilities? Check out the SustainFloyd website at http://www.sustainfloyd.org to see what I mean.

Rad people like Mia Birk, Theaster Gates, and Nicco Mele will be speaking at the (X)po and mixing it up with attendees. So where do I come in? Well first of all, I went downtown to meet the folks at City Works – Brent, Francis & Beth – and they are totally great, energetic, and fun people. They figured (rightly, I might add) you can’t have a super hip, smart meeting of the minds without locally roasted, superbly prepared coffee. So Red Rooster will be providing the Fair Trade Organic coffee & espresso for this super-cool event, including pour-over drip plus lattes and the like.

Surprisingly, the CityWorks folks also asked me to speak at the event, which is a great honor that I can only attribute to people like you, who are currently online reading about our company, who have donated to our Kickstarter project, who buy our coffee online, or who have a hand-printed private label coffee bag/blend of your own. Without your support, a small rural company from a small rural town would have no place at a media savvy, high tech, innovative conference like the CityWorks(X)po, but thanks to your help, we’ve been invited to a big dance. Thank you.

Floyd Fest Recap

Things that happened:

• We finished the Floyd Fest building with a lot of help from people like Jim Knapp, Jim Belcher, Jim Newlin, and lots of other people who aren’t named Jim. Like my dad.
• The building has all kinds of cool things about it, namely that it is a good looking structure that is also functional. I really like the shutters that Jim Knapp and I came up with. Each one folds out differently and allows for maximizing space and utility.
• We sold coffee at Fandango Beer & Wine Fest, which was easy. The hard part was the 48 hours leading up to the festival when we were still wiring in outlets, moving in refrigerators, and trying to get machines hardwired in.
• Fandango’s defining moment: At 2 in the morning before we were to open at 6am we realized one group (the brewing head) on the brand new espresso machine didn’t work. After virtually no sleep the night before and lots of other things to worry about, there was nothing to do but go to sleep and be hopeful that one group would be able to keep up. When I woke up at 5am, I decided to take the thing apart and see what I could find. While Rose looked skeptically on, I managed to take out enough screws and remove enough paneling and heat guards to worm my arm up into an electrical box where I found a wiring clip that was unhooked. After accidentally unhooking the other group I managed to get them both plugged in and voila, the espresso machine worked. Almost. (We still had to program it, which had to wait until after Fandango.)
• Despite the fact that we promised ourselves we would prepare meticulously over the three weeks leading up to Floyd Fest, we were still in a panicked rush to open the shop on Wed. afternoon. By the end of Thursday we had sold virtually nothing and were feeling really disheartened about the whole experience. In fact, late Thursday night, around 2:30am when Rose and I finally hit the sack, we were apologizing to each other, convinced the festival was a mistake.
• Then the people came.
• There’s hardly anything that can compare to the feeling of a rush during a busy time in a restaurant or any other food service. Particularly when many of the items must be meticulously prepared to an exacting standard. What took place between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon was nothing short of the most exhilarating, exciting, and exhausting work experience I have ever had. During that time our little coffee shop never once experienced a lull, a break; not a single moment when there weren’t customers at our window. It was simply amazing.
• During the festival, Benjie Osborne, Paris Polseno-Hensley, and Russell Chisholm of Easy Chair Coffee Shop in Blacksburg were brewing coffee and giving it away for free to artists, staff, and VIP in the backstage area. This meant Benjie & Russ were getting up with Rose & I every morning at 5 to make sure coffee was brewed by 6. The two of them made a heroic effort to create an awesome environment backstage while providing top notch service & coffee. Huzzah! Plus Becky and others were taking care of the shop in town so we could all brew at the Festival and Amy Myers, a recent addition to the Loft staff worked her tail off the whole weekend.
• Monumental contributions were made by Rose’s whole family, including Justin, Brian, and Tully, the husbands who never had any idea this was what it would mean to be married to a McCutchan. Come to think of it, I had no idea either.
• Defining moment of Floyd Fest: Saturday night, 3 McCutchan sisters working the machines & making drinks – Elsie, Theda, Rose. Russell Chisholm is manning the drip brewer plus handing out stickers & magnets. Jess Spangler, Shannon DiPietro, and myself are on the registers. Tully & Mac are washing dishes and making iced coffee. Avis is wrapping baked goods. At 10:30pm the line is backed up to the patio at about 50 people deep. Almost every drink ordered is a specialty espresso drink. If someone orders a Whoopie Pie we all shout out “Whoopie!!” I take a moment and ask everyone to be quiet, including the folks in line, and we all give the baristas a hearty round of applause and cheers.
• Sunday the fog rolled in and I got a crazy case of exhaustion and dehydration. While working the register the bicep on my left arm started to spasm. I called Tully over and he was like, “Yeah, that’s weird.” Then the woman whose order I was taking was like, “You don’t look so good.” I assume she thought I was on drugs, but really I just hadn’t had anything to eat or drink that day and I was on a combined 6 hours of sleep over four days. That will do weird things to your body. So I had some iced tea and a sandwich and felt a lot better.
• It’s taken us about the whole month after the festival to fully recover, clean up the building, pull all the equipment out, and generally feel like we are caught up. Though, in the words of my father-in-law, we are like sharks – if we stop moving, we die. We are already making large plans for next year and trying to figure out what our next project will be.

Who is “They”?

Rose and I watched Conspiracy Theory this week – Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts – not the worst movie to waste two hours satisfying a Netflix Instant addiction. Besides the obvious notion that Mel Gibson’s character reminded me a lot of some characters around Floyd, one thing I noticed was that there was an awful lot of talk about “they.” Who is “they”? “They” are out to get us. “They” are in cahoots to control the world. Or sometimes, “they” just don’t exist.

A lot of people have been asking me recently “So, when do they start on the building up at Floyd Fest?” My answer, now down pat, is inevitably, “Who is they? They is me.” 

But I have to admit this isn’t entirely true. We’ve been lucky enough to have friends from all over volunteer their services, offering to give up their weekend and come help us raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Plus we’ve already had lots of time and work donated to us – for example Steve Arthur of StreamLine TimberWorks has spent a ton of his own time putting together the plans for this building. Plus, Ed Erwin and his crew of Professional Builders are going to come out and help us knock out a big part of the framing operation.

A low quality picture of our high quality plans

In all probability, even with all of the help, there will be many a long day (turned late evening) spent up on the Floyd Fest mountain, putting in flooring, tongue & groove ceiling, and hanging hemlock siding. I anticipate calling on my dad, my brother, my wife, my father-in-law, my brothers-in-law, my friends’ fathers, and whatever poor soul is unlucky enough to answer the phone when I call some Saturday afternoon needing a cut-man. Fair warning, friends.

On Saturday we actually made the first real steps in construction. Becky’s father, Jim Belcher, drove his tractor from Connor Grove Rd. up to the site and we dug the first ten footer holes. Thank goodness for augers.

Thanks, Jim!! Of course, in typical fashion, I forgot to dig the holes for the posts supporting the porch roof so Jim and I will have to go up there again and auger out two more holes. Sorry, Jim!!

After those holes are finish, we’ll get Stuart Concrete to come up and pour some ‘cretions in there to give us a good base for our bottom supporting posts. These will be treated 6×6 and once those suckers are in the ground, the fun really begins.

Supply and Demand

We learned some tough lessons about growth this week. Since we don’t have enough room to house multiple bags of a single origin of coffee, we have to time our ordering just right. This week, I ordered four bags of coffee on Monday morning. Lots of times coffee will be shipped the day following the order and arrive within 24 hours of being shipped. Not this time.

I think, (but I have no proof and my logic may be totally inductive,) that smaller shipping companies in our region are not making as many deliveries because fuel costs are too high. So if you live in Floyd, you have to wait until someone else needs something delivered in a semi before you can get your shipment.

For whatever reason, we didn’t get our green coffee delivered on Wednesday like I was hoping. This meant that a fairly large number of our wholesale orders were going to be late. Thankfully, everyone we supply coffee to is really understanding and a pleasure to work with. Still, it makes me feel amateurish to have to call them and explain that I won’t be able to deliver on time. Having supply issues is a common symptom of being small – but it is one I have always hoped to avoid.

On Thursday afternoon Rose and I drove down to Roanoke to pick up two 150lb bags of coffee that weren’t going to make it up the mountain until Friday. (Our little car looks so funny with 300lbs of coffee in the trunk!) That evening we roasted everything we could and made deliveries on Friday morning. Then we played the waiting game (which was also the “calling the importer and asking where our coffee is” game) until 5pm on Friday with the other 2 bags arrived. Then we roasted as much as we could, made another round of deliveries, got home around 10pm, got up early, kept roasting, and finally finished making all of our deliveries by 4pm on Saturday.

What did we learn from this little misadventure? First of all, that our customers are totally awesome. No one was upset with us for being late, though they totally had the right to be. Second, that to avoid this situation in the future we have to be even more adept at ordering coffee ahead of time. I love my job because it is a puzzle to be solved on many different levels.* Not only do we have to roast the best coffee possible, we have to maintain a level of professionalism as we navigate the terrain of being both a wholesaler and a retailer. Step one? You guessed it. I’ve already ordered enough coffee for two weeks in advance.

*Also, I get to roast and drink coffee from all around the world all day long!

The internet is crazy!

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But for reals and seriouses, if you know how to use the www, you can take over the world. Or at least derail people’s productivity through clever marketing or videos of people falling down. We had a really successful trip into the internets with our Kickstarter project – it was fun and also super stressful. That place is amazing! For example, check out these guys who made 300 grand on Kickstarter: http://kck.st/hLU2zo. Their project is super slick, totally cool looking, really inventive, cutting edge, and also a complete waste of space. In short, it’s the perfect thing for the world wide web (of deceit [insert evil laugh]).

Red Rooster IT Department

I use the interwebs for various things. Email, of course (really, does anyone use phones anymore? They’re so small and hot against your ear and people are always yelling and asking you for stuff. Besides, email is way easier to pretend you didn’t get.) I also really like to read the New York Times, The Onion, and Pitchfork.com. Throw in some Huffington Post if I’m feeling too clean and sometimes that damn MSN homepage when my wife logs out of her email and leaves the page open. That thing will suck you in with its leading BS headlines! These are what I like to call the educational time vampires. I should spend less time on all of them but at least when someone asks me “Hey, did you see that thing about the thing that smart informed people should know about?” I can always say, “Oh yeah, I read that.” Even if I only saw the headline.

Then there is The Website That Shall Not Be Named – the one I joined so that I could promote my new business and ended up spending too much time on. That one’s a good site for sociopaths who really hate people but want to know what everyone else thinks about everything. Or for seeing whether or not everyone you once knew inevitably turned into an adult. Or what someone had for breakfast. It’s the place where everyone goes to check up on whether or not they are normal. My general feelings about this place are: Hey, maybe it’s good (but it’s probably bad.) At least most people I know post generally positive status updates like, I just ran 5 miles (a-holes) or I agree with this editorial or Happy Flag Day! Not too many people are going on there to say Hey, everyone, I just masturbated to internet porn and then ate a week old burrito to compensate for the guilt.

I have a funny relationship (it’s complicated!! haha. barf.) with the Face place because ostensibly I’m supposed to be on there to promote my business, not to find out whose marriage is on the rocks or to see 50 million pictures of my old acquaintance’s baby. Now she’s in a swing! Now she’s on a chair! Now she’s asleep! So I end up saying a lot of things that could be construed as “Don’t forget about my coffee.” I don’t feel great about this because I don’t feel great about advertising in general, but I figure at least I’m not trying to trick people into buying my product by making them think it will make them prettier or smarter or cooler. Maybe I would if I could, but I can’t.

Another thing I use the internet for is a little thing called Netflix. Do I feel a little guilty that my local video rental store is going out of business? Maybe. I just hope the person who started Netflix is a nice guy because he or she sure is a rich-ass genius. Also, I like to watch March Madness on demand. If college basketball was on the internet year round, I would never get anything done.

My point here is… um… if this were a thesis I would not be getting distinction. My point is, damn y’all, the internet is crazy!. Kind of. My point is, I have all kinds of conflicting feelings about the internet and the wastes of time and all the insane ways to stay connected like Twitter and Tumbler and other made up or misspelled words. But it’s what we have. At one time people probably thought cave paintings were too gaudy and a waste of time. “That Throg, why does he have to paint a woolly mammoth on the cave every time he spears one?”

The truth is, a business like ours needs the internet because in slow months we need to reach our audience and hopefully encourage them to buy something. So until people are doing something else, I’ll be going on the internet to say “Hi, I roast coffee and I hope you like it. And look at this video of this guy falling down!!! It’s hilarious!”

Kickstarter, what the…?

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve been hounding our Facebook friends and email list and whomever else we can think of about the project we’ve posted on Kickstarter.com. Our goal is to build a beautiful post & beam coffee shop on the grounds of Floyd Fest and serve our artisan locally roasted, fair trade, organic coffee at the festival. You can click here to go to Kickstarter and see the video I made about the building.

I’ve spoken to several people who are confused by the project and I thought I’d take a moment to tackle the questions I’ve heard so far:

1. What happens to the money if you don’t make your goal? ($16,500) If we don’t reach our goal on Kickstarter, we don’t get any of the money. All the payments go through Amazon, who holds your credit card info until Kickstarter tells them the goal has been reached. If we don’t reach the goal, no one’s credit card is charged.
2. Aren’t I just investing in your business with no return? I think you could look at it that way. We prefer to think of it as a down payment on having really great specialty coffee at the festival while helping out a small business you like. Plus, we’re giving away all sorts of rewards to try to make it worth your while. Philosophically, it makes a certain amount of sense that you wouldn’t want to just spend your hard earned money investing in someone else’s business with no return, unless you just really like the idea of small family owned businesses getting a little boost. You could think of it as a corporate tax break that comes from the populace instead of the guv. Our dream when we started the project was that about 16,000 people would see the project, think it was cool, and slap down $1 as a way to guarantee they got awesome coffee at the festival. Plus, the producers of Floyd Fest have offered to raffle 2 free tickets to Floyd Fest for $5 donations, so that seems like a pretty nice incentive.
3. So basically, I give you $1 or $5 or $50 and you go out and make a bunch of money at Floyd Fest and I get a bag of coffee and a shirt? Not exactly. First, we think what you get out of that investment is more than the rewards on Kickstarter. You get to be behind a local company, keeping dollars here in Floyd (instead of NC or MD where the last few Floyd Fest coffee vendors have hailed from), creating a few temporary jobs with the potential for permanence. For as much as you would give a homeless person or a cup of bad coffee, you can show love to your favorite coffee roaster. Also, to clarify, we don’t really stand to make that much money this year, even with your help. Here’s a break down of our projected expenses:

• $3,500-$6,000 – Actual building cost
• $5,000-$7,000 – 2 group espresso machine
• $2,000 – 30 gallon drip coffee brewer
• $1,500 – iced coffee/slushee maker
• $2,100 – green organic coffee
• $2000 – merchandise (t-shirts, brewers, grinders, etc.)
• $500 – cups
• $600 – milk, cream & sugar
• $500 – baked goods
• $2,000 – employee wages
• $2,000 – $4,000 – Kickstarter Rewards

These numbers are based on our goal of providing the absolute best coffee possible as quickly and professionally as we can. Basically, with your help the business stands to end up somewhere between breaking even and making about $4,000 at Floyd Fest this year, weather permitting. Without your help, we stand to lose between $4,000 & $10,000 this year (plus we’ll have to find the capital somewhere.)No pressure.

What we’re saying is, Hey, we’d love your help. Even a dollar will make us feel loved. If you don’t want to give because you’re broke or you think it’s a scam, no biggee. We won’t be upset. We know that life is full of crazy twists and turns and this just happens to be a big loop-de-loop for us.

Here’s the link again, in case you actually made it to the bottom of this post:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1352896841/the-floyd-fest-community-coffee-shop

Chicago

Since returning from our trip out west, I’ve been thinking a lot about quality. In Chicago, Rose and I stopped in on one of the big boys in coffee roasting, Intelligentsia Coffee. In fact, we called them as we were riding the train from DC to Chicago thinking, no way this is going to work. After a moment of hesitation, some hemming and hawing, and I don’t know, some parting of the seas, Paul Rekstad said, “Sure, okay, stop by. How about eleven?” So we stopped by.

We figured it was bound to be awkward. And it was, at first. We asked Paul where we should eat lunch and he went through every place to eat on the west side of Chicago and then asked everyone who wandered in the room where they would suggest we eat. After fifteen minutes in one of the world’s premier coffee roasting facilities, we knew a lot more about burritos in Chicago than we did about coffee.

We sat around the cupping lab, furnished with a sample roaster, a hot water dispenser, scales, timers, and more Chemexes than you could shake a stick at, and we kind of stared at each other. Finally, after we all loosened up a little and had a Chemex of a brand new unreleased Rwandan coffee (superb, with lots of apricot & tart fruit notes, if you must know) Paul started to tell us a little about the development of the Intelligentsia Direct Trade program and how it makes for some of the best coffee you can get your hands on. Intelligentsia, like a lot of the major roasters, sends knowledgeable and skilled people from their company to help growers and processors at origin to develop a better product. That alone is amazing. But what really blew me away was that they will regularly send representatives of Intelligentsia to origin 2 or 3 years before the company will even buy the coffee. Now that’s dedication.

By the time we made it down to the roaster floor, Paul was really on a roll. There were two 90 kilo roasters cranking away (the coffee is delivered to the drum with a grain elevator), a warehouse full of swollen jute bags of Peruvian coffee, and twenty or so hipster dudes roasting, profiling with an Agtron machine, filling and sealing bags (by hand), blending, and even grinding the occasional bag. As Paul told us how the Direct Trade market and the use of Grain-Pro plastic bags allowed for the freshest coffee ever to be brought to market, we realized we had to leave or we would miss our train to Montana. We shook hands with Paul and thanked him profusely, then wandered back out into the freezing cold Chicago streets.

Since returning home, I’ve redoubled my cupping and tasting rigorously in an attempt to make sure our coffee is as good as it can possibly be. I’ve also started to order coffee that is shipped in the Grain-Pro bags whenever possible in order to ensure that the green coffee is the freshest I can get my hands on. I think that with continued hard work and vigilant cupping, we can be sure our coffee is top notch. Plus, with a dedicated customer base to keep us on our toes, we’ll be guaranteed to be roasting some of the best coffee around.

Hello again.

Hi there. Long time no see.

It’s cold today. Lately that’s what the small talk is. Everyone is cold, everyone has blankets over the windows, everyone is getting up wood. If the temperature gets above forty we’re all ready to start tilling the garden or take a dip in the pond. In the Roost the only thing to do is turn on the roaster and heat the place up while we keep the store stocked. It’s been smokier than usual inside lately – at first I thought it was a low pressure storm system or some other weather phenomenon that was keeping the stack from drawing, but upon further inspection I can see now that the cap at the top of our stack is full of chaff. This has got to be from the crazy amount of roasting we did from October through December. I guess I’ll be climbing up there this weekend to clean it out.

Although we had an excellent holiday season, particularly for our first year out of the gate, we have been stung by the constantly rising price of green coffee. Check out this chart from USAToday showing the consistent rise in price from June 2010, (basically when we opened our doors.)  The numbers on the right are cents per pound, so you can see that right now the price for conventional coffee is over $2.20 a pound from around $1.40 a pound in May.  Coffee prices are now at a 13.5 year high, up 75% from a year ago, and coffee roasters everywhere are struggling to stay afloat while keeping prices competitive.



Of course we don’t buy conventional coffee. We buy all Fair Trade Organic coffee, which is considerable more expensive. The myth about FTO coffee prices is that since FTOs aren’t traded on the commodities market, their prices are more stable. This, as far as I can tell, is total BS. Even though the FTOs aren’t traded on the C market, their prices are still dictated by the price of conventional coffee.

A business is probably not supposed to do this, but let’s take a look at Red Rooster expenses for 1 pound of FTO Costa Rica Tarrazu.

• The last bag of green coffee I bought was purchased for $4.05 a pound – note the difference compared to the cost on the chart above.
• Now multiply that times 1.16, since each pound of green coffee is reduced by 16% in weight during the roasting process, making the cost per pound $4.70.
• Now add the costs of delivery, electricity, bags, tin ties, printing, and labor. I’ll be a little mysterious here and leave out those numbers, but I think you can see where I’m going with this. Now consider that the first bag of Costa Rican that I bought back in July cost around $3 a pound.
• This may not seem like a huge deal – it’s only a dollar right – but when you’re dealing with thousands of pounds of coffee, it adds up (or subtracts) really fast.

The potential problem with rising prices is that customers have grown accustomed to paying a certain amount for coffee and they are resistant to paying more. Who wouldn’t be? Still, it’s a lot like gasoline – when prices rise we are actually paying closer to what the product is worth. Many coffee growers all over the world are pleased with the rising prices, except those affected by the weather that is causing the price hike. That’s right – let’s not forget that coffee is a crop and it’s grown in high elevation tropical areas that are often subject to intense rains or intense droughts. Right now, the Brazilian crop (which is a two year cycle) is in the down year. This, combined with flooding in Colombia and Sumatra, has caused traders to speculate that the crop will be small. Therefore prices go up.

My concern with rising prices is two fold, and essentially the equivalent of a nagging itch. For one, I have to run my business and it’s harder with higher prices – purely selfish, I know. Second, the price hikes are purely based on speculation and my sense, though I may be wrong, is that traders in Chicago and elsewhere are actually making a lot of the money that should be going to the growers.

Why Local? Part Two

Disclaimer: The owners of Red Rooster are not perfect. We sometimes shop at large corporate entities for the sake of ease and accessibility. But we try not to.

Whether we like it or not, a lot of us judge our quality of life based on how much money we have or, in the very least, the kinds of things we are able to buy. Despite the old adage that money can’t buy happiness, or love, we still want the green stuff. Plus, it’s naive to think that people stuck in poverty wouldn’t be happier if a bunch of money came out of the faucet one morning. (Nevermind the fact that sociologists have run study after study that shows that happiness tops off at about 75 grand and can’t increase no matter how many billions you accrue. The median income is $52,000 so these studies don’t help a fat lot of us.)

Still, I think our quality of life can be improved through some choices that only cosmetically involve money. It is old fashioned, (and maybe someday it will be cool enough to be called “retro”) but I like the sense of comaraderie and inclusion that comes from walking into a restaurant or place of business and being called by name, knowing the owner’s name, knowing their kids. The same feeling extends towards producers, including the beer & wine I drink, the vegetables & meat I eat, and, of course, my coffee. (The classic cinematic scene of an urbanite being welcomed at his favorite watering hole and ushered to his regular table – this is not a myth reserved for the movies.)

This means enough to me that I try to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve heard enough comments about the costs of local producers and restauranteurs to know that price is a consideration for even the most die-hard locavore. But quality ingredients, organic ingredients, & Fair Trade ingredients can often (but not always) come with high costs. (A common sentiment I’ve heard is folks who say they hope so-and-so succeeds, but their prices are too high. To me, this is like giving moral support to a child stuck in a busy intersection. But I digress.)

So what do I get out of (sometimes) spending a little more money on locally produced goods. Does it improve my life knowing that I used to play pool at Margie’s house and I watched the Dodgers beat the A’s in her basement back in ’88? What do I gain from knowing Katherine Chantal’s kids for most of my life? Or from knowing that Haden & Kathy Dulaney of Highland Beef used to live right down the road from Benjie & his family? Or that Jon & Katie Roberts of Dogtown were two of the first people I met when I moved back to Floyd? Or that Brett Nichols of Shooting Creek Farm Brewery and Five Penny Farm lives right across the road from my parents and I can stop in on him any time to get beer or vegetables? Or that Woody Crenshaw of the Country Store gave me my second job out of college? That the artists in 16Hands were practically my surrogate parents? Or that Kerry Underwood at Oddfellas still treats Rose like family though she hasn’t worked there in over a year? The answer is, clearly, that I gain a huge sense of community and that yes, indeed, very much, it improves my life to be able to spend my money on people who I know on a first name basis, who are a part of my life, and who make up this town we call home.

Spending your money locally is also one of the most powerful votes you will ever cast in your life. For more on stuffing the ballot box, check in next week.

 

Why Local? Part One

For the next few posts, I’ll be giving my own personal appeal for folks to buy local this holiday season (and every season.) I can’t quite explain the personal satisfaction and sense of community I get when a local customer comes into my store, but sufficed to say, my business depends on it as do the businesses of my family. I’ll begin this series with a disclaimer: My wife and I are by no means perfect. We occasionally shop at Target. We often shop at Food Lion. All we can say is that we care and we make a concerted effort to buy locally, to tip well, and to support the causes we believe in. Sometimes we fail.

I think everyone, even the most well-intention person, probably has lots of little reasons for buying things at chain stores or at shopping malls. The main reason, I believe, is the illusion of cost savings. There are two methods by which a large corporation will attempt to trick its customers into thinking they are saving money.

The first is by offering a cheap product, one that is probably made overseas by wage-slaves and will likely break within the year. While these products might be relatively inexpensive in the moment, they take a toll on the environment (shipping, waste, factories) and they take a toll on our national economy (lower GDP, lower wages, lower employment), meaning a cheap product actually hurts your wallet in the long run. Food products can be especially damaging to the national economy and to people’s finances since the agri-business model has led to job loss and the promotion of “cheap” (corn or soy bean infused) foods has led to a health crisis of huge magnitude, driving up costs for care and insurance. This model applies to that “cheap” coffee you buy at Food Lion or Krogers as well. Unless labeled otherwise, the coffee is inevitably sprayed with pesticides and picked by machines or underpaid laborers, affecting the planet, the country of origin, and your own health.

Once on the shelf, the products are marked down by the company, which is the second phase of the illusion of cost savings. Large companies operate with what is called a loss-leader, marking down the price of one product in order to entice customers into the store and spend their money on other products with a much higher mark-up. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as savvy enough shoppers to avoid being swayed by such tactics, but if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.

The question I try to ask of myself is whether my quality of life is really improved by the money I save shopping at corporate chain stores. Most of the time, the answer is no. For the reasons why, check out my next blog post.