1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
New Orleans is unlike any other city in the world. By supporting local businesses, you help maintain New Orleans' diversity & distinctive flavor.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.
3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
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 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.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels local innovation and creativity while generating economic opportunity.
7. Public Benefits and Cost
Local stores in town centers require less infrastructure and are a more efficient use of public services compared to big box stores and strip malls.
8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, walkable town centers-which reduce sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Product Diversity
Small businesses select products based on their own interests and the needs of their customers, not on a national sales plan. This guarantees a better and broader range of product choices.
*Adapted and reprinted with permission of Stacy Mitchell
StayLocal is about Culture
Locally owned businesses imbue New Orleans with its unique character and aura of authenticity and are a big part of why people want to live, learn and work here.
StayLocal is about Culture. Locally owned businesses are a stabilizing presence in neighborhoods throughout greater New Orleans’ five parishes, providing community gathering places and linking neighbors. New Orleans’ cultural traditions are to be respected for shaping the unique character of our city and region.
Just as many of New Orleans' locally owned businesses are handed down from generation to generation, so too are business recommendations passed along, word-of-mouth, from mother to daughter, father to son, friend to friend. In most US cities, shopping is an impersonal experience and transactions are purely financial. Not so in New Orleans, where your haircut comes with a history lesson, your contractor is a font of culinary wisdom, and the cab driver giving you a lift today may be the musician you go out to see tonight.
Beyond sound economics, there are cultural reasons to invest our local dollars in local businesses. Across the country communities are lamenting the destruction of local culture. New Orleans, thankfully, has maintained a cultural richness admired by tourists from across the globe. Choosing to spend locally supports local talent and local culture; visitors and locals alike may access our online guide to local businesses here.
StayLocal is about Commerce
StayLocal is about Commerce. The positive economic impact of keeping dollars circulating within the local economy is measurable and effective. Dollars spent locally generate twice the annual sales, recirculate revenue within the local economy at twice the rate, and on a per square foot basis, have four times the economic impact, when compared to leading chain competitors. Study after study (like this one in New Orleans) show locally-owned, independent business is far better for the local economy than shopping at non-local businesses. The reason? This multiplier effect occurs.
When you spend money at a local businesses, they then re-spend that money throughout the local economy at a much greater rate than chains, who ship most of your money off to wherever corporate HQ is.
What are the three main reasons for this greater economic impact? Independent stores have a higher local payroll (when no part of the business operation is located in Houston or Atlanta, no money goes to paying someone in Houston or Atlanta); local stores purchase more goods and services locally; and the local stores retain a much larger share of their profits within the local economy.
It just makes sense. When people live and pay taxes and send their kids to school where they have their business, they're more invested in the well-being of their community in every way. By patronizing these local shops, service providers and entrepreneurs, we are creating a more self-sufficient, prosperous place to live. Find your next favorite local business at staylocal.org/find
StayLocal is about Environment
StayLocal is about Environment. Local stores and services help to sustain vibrant, walkable neighborhoods, which in turn reduce sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
A strong economy is a sustainable economy, and a sustainable economy is one with as many built-in local networks as possible. The more we buy and source from businesses that are firmly rooted here in New Orleans, the more resilient we become. That’s why we help business owners in StayLocal’s network source from one another.
Waste, too, is an increasingly important issue for local businesses as more of them set their own sustainability goals. This comes out of operational imperatives at restaurants, which add recycling and or composting. Local business owners are also leading the way in providing alternatives to the way festival goers and Mardi Gras revelers enjoy local events.
The further you have to travel to obtain goods the more energy is expended and the more adverse the environmental impact. Because want to make staying local simple, we publish an online map of thousands of local businesses. Many of these businesses, with smaller digital footprints than the big boxes, are hard to find unless you search for them on a directory tailored to your search. Find out more about what’s small and local at staylocal.org/find.
