In towns across America, private businesses and groups compete for support. This is to be expected and defended in a free society. That competition for support need not — and should not — receive a preferential boost from local government. It’s only in a community where bureaucrats are confused about the limits of government that one sees city hall trying to boost one private effort, at the expense of other efforts. In doing so, government turns legitimately private efforts into objects of political favoritism.
Whitewater now has a Buy Local campaign, established to encourage not merely local shopping, but a particular kind of local shopping: for Mom & Pop stores over chain stores. I’m not part of this campaign, but I’d be the first to encourage merchants to organize privately as they might wish. Make no mistake: the campaign isn’t simply about encouraging shoppers to frequent merchants located within the City of Whitewater, but certain merchants over others. The City of Whitewater has endorsed this campaign, on its website, and in the remarks of her city manager, Kevin Brunner.
Here’s a Buy Local campaign emblem that now appears on the city’s municipal website:
Here are the remarks Whitewater’s city manager in support of the campaign:
The Whitewater Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Whitewater Inc. formally unveiled its “Think Whitewater-Buy Local” campaign.
The benefits of spending more of our dollars locally can’t be underestimated. The 2008 Retail Coach Study of the Whitewater Market Area showed that over $400 million “leaks” out of our community and is spent in other retail markets each year, most notably to Janesville. National studies too have shown that for every $100 dollar spent in independently owned stores, $68 returns back to the community through payroll taxes, payroll and other expenditures. If that same $100 is spent in a national chain, only $43 stays locally. If it is spent on-line, nothing comes home!
Special thanks to downtown business person Ron Binning for his leadership and dogged determination to start this program in our community, as well as the many others who have worked on developing it—good work!
At the www.whitewaterbuylocal.com website, one finds these exhortations to shop “locally”:
For every $100 spent at a locally owned store, $45 remains in the local economy
For every $100 spent at a chain store, $13 remains in the local economy Source: BusinessWeek
“People ask if we are really local. We have to prove it to them. My response is, ask other bankers what their stock symbol is. If they have an answer, they’re not locally owned.”
Art Johnson, chief executive of United Bank of Michigan
The study that the Buy Local website cites is not, by the way, from Bloomberg’s Businessweek. It’s really from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that includes tool kits with anti-Walmart propaganda.
(See, http://www.bigboxtoolkit.com. ILSR is hardly an objective, unbiased business publication, the way one might think of Bloomberg’s publications.)
There’s a difference between starting and building a local campaign and receiving not merely community support, but the endorsement of local government. I don’t think it’s a distinction that would be apparent, or mean anything, to Whitewater’s city manager.
The whole municipal history of these last years involves intervention for ineffectual project after project, Next Big Thing after Next Big Thing, while child poverty and unemployment in the city remain above-average, and storefronts are still vacant. (There will be rationalizations and disappointments yet ahead, too: the catalogue of failed municipal projects will only grow over the next year.)
It’s also too funny to write that the “benefits of spending more of our dollars locally can’t be underestimated.” I think the city manager meant to say can’t be overestimated. In any event, that’s silly — of course the number can be either over-estimated or under-estimated. That’s why one commissions a study about it. It’s too funny to see the Retail Coach study back from the dead — how odd that it’s finally getting some use; here one sees another fine municipal investment.
Proponents of the campaign should not look favorably on the city’s endorsement, however: Whitewater’s municipal government is fickle in her devotions, has a limited attention span, and poor track record. I’d guess that the endorsement is simply government’s lip-service to the effort, all the while paving the way for an expanded Walmart.
If it should be true that every consumer in Whitewater chose to stop buying at chain stores, I would not object. That’s a free decision that each person should make on his own.
I see no reason for Whitewater’s government to interfere in that process, with a preference for some shops over other Whitewater tax-paying businesses. Walmart and Walgreen’s are located with the City of Whitewater just as much as other shops. When municipal government says says “Think Whitewater – Buy Local,” where local expressly excludes chain stores, the city is effectively saying: you’re not the “real” local.
It’s not the place of Whitewater’s city manager — no matter how many pies into which he wants to stick his fingers — to say that the thousands of people who shop in those chains weekly, and scores who work there, aren’t being locally supportive.
That’s an effort for a truly private campaign, and for private citizens, to contend about, and to decide, on their own.
Consumers should be able to decide for themselves without the misuse of government’s imprimatur.