Spending money in a hyper-local way helps not only your immediate community, but your city as a whole. Studies show the money spent at local businesses goes back into the local economy at a higher rate than money spent at big box stores.
Supporting your local businesses helps create your neighborhood communities. A strong community can help create a sense of safety, better schools, increased home value, and numerous other benefits.
A report from Pew Charitable Trust in 2020-"Research has shown that smaller businesses—nonprofit and for-profit, new and old—enable numerous activities of daily life, giving many residents their first work experiences, and sustaining and revitalizing neighborhoods.1 They are sources of innovation, generating more patents per employee than large companies do.2 They embody entrepreneurism when they launch or hire as well as cut back or shut down, all aspects of a healthy market life cycle that economists sometimes call “creative destruction."3 And they provide essential community, civic, and social services, often as tax-exempt nonprofit businesses, which are counted alongside other small and midsize businesses.
1 A. Nijhuis and K. Zeuli, “The Critical Role Small Businesses Play in Inner City Revitalization,” Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (blog), May 3, 2017.
2 A. Breitzman and D. Hicks, “An Analysis of Small Business Patents by Industry and Firm Size” (Rowan University, 2008).
3 J.A. Schumpeter and E.B. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
