Every time you present your Go Local Card at a participating location, you will:
•Get sweet deals created just for Go Local cardholders
•Support your local economy
•Have an extra excuse to hit up your favorite store, restaurant, or hot spot
•Learn which businesses are local that you may not have been aware of
•Take a small step in helping the environment by replacing hundreds of paper coupons wit
h one card
Best of all, the Go Local card always offers you immediate gratification, and can be used as often as your heart desires for approximately 12 months from the moment of purchase. No one-time-only restrictions. And even better, it’s only ten bucks. The benefits of shopping locally are irrefutable: it keeps our money in the local economy helping independent businesses compete against big national chains. It lessens our impact on the Earth’s environment, and it nurtures that curious and beautiful thing that makes our community so…OURS. These are the things we’re passionate about and they are what inspired the Go Local concept. Our mission is very simple: to simultaneously champion the businesses that make our community unique and reward the people that support them. Good for your community. Good for you. TEN REASONS TO SHOP LOCAL
1. Be Some Place, Not Any Place
By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Hill Country’s diversity and distinctive flavor. Big Box and chain stores are the same everywhere – let’s keep Hill Country “Hill Country” for those who live here and those still on their way here.
2. Feel Right in Your Neighborhood
Local businesses build strong neighborhoods in a grass roots fashion -by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, contributing more to local causes, hiring local residents for most if not all of its positions, and buying from other local sources and services.
3. Our Town when it comes to Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community, who feel the impacts of those decisions and who are ready to step up as community leaders.
4. What’s Spent Locally Stays Local
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
5. Jobs and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do with greater job security.
6. Entrepreneurship Happens on Main Street
Entrepreneurs fuel America’s economic innovation and prosperity. Entrepreneurship serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage paying jobs and into the middle class.
7. Shopping Locally Saves Local Tax Dollars
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
8. Sustainability Makes you Happy
Localism reduces sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss and water pollution. Independently owned businesses more often source local products such as farm produce and local services such as legal, accounting, advertising.
9. Competition Makes Cents
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Make Mine Local for Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices. Thank you for keeping it local! Adapted and Reprinted from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance www.ilsr.org
