Since 1992, along with business partner Ann Caverzan, Liz Crocker has been running P’Lovers, the environmental store in Park Lane. She’s seen the complexion of local business change, become more self-aware and more sensitive to ecology. She’s also seen the locovore and slow food movements go mainstream, overtaking the message that spending money in locally owned businesses benefits the community.
“I think people are really getting the food thing, but I don’t know that people are getting the value of local merchants,” she says.
Though the attention paid to the Seaport Farmers’ Market has been great—and it has a fair share of artisans and craftspeople offering their wares on site—it’s mostly known for the Nova Scotia agricultural yield it brings into the city. Is anyone talking about a mall consisting of only locally owned businesses?
“It has occurred to me,” says Crocker. “One of the things that I’ve commented to the manager of Park Lane is that this mall has a larger percentage of locally owned businesses than the average, so why don’t you market it? ‘Your town, downtown.’ That’s a real plus. Downtown is the antithesis of the big box stores in every way possible. It’s multinational companies versus local.”
Park Lane wasn’t open to the idea of marketing itself as a location for local business, or so Heidi Hallett, former owner of Frog Hollow Books, recalls. “They chose not to promote that. We saw it as a great opportunity, with so many locally owned businesses.” Hallett suggests the larger local businesses should be leading the charge, and with more than just food. “What about Sobeys?” she asks. “Local is only in the produce section. They have an international aisle, why don’t they have a local aisle?”
Historic Properties on the Halifax waterfront houses more than 95 percent locally owned businesses, reports Stuart MacRea, director of leasing and marketing for The Armour Group, overseer of the properties. “We have fairly consistent sales year- around,” he says, downplaying the idea that the mall is a tourist trap, though he adds that keeping business is a tough sell. “Downtown retail is a dying breed,” he says. With plans moving forward to rebrand the mall, MacRae says promoting it as a destination for buying local is only a possible part of the agenda. “It’s tough to compete with the Farmers’ Market,” he says. “We’d do a blended message.”
If there is a resistance in some quarters to promote the idea of local business to consumers, a more grassroots approach continues to thrive.
“We have to show the economics of it in really simple terms,” says Crocker. “If you live downtown and drive out to Bayers Lake, first of all, what do you spend on gas? And where does the money go that you spend on goods out there? To a company whose head office is in Wyoming? Or Toronto? If it stays here it works to support all kinds of other things.”
Crocker muses on what our city would look like if all the local business failed from a lack of interest. “I’m sure people would be horrified. I know when we closed our store in Wolfville years ago we heard that. I wanted to say, well, I didn’t see you in our store! But I didn’t. What would Halifax be we without local businesses? Tourists wouldn’t want to come here, for sure.”
Chara Kingston runs Love, Me Boutique, which sells locally made crafts, home accessories and fashions. She sees a Buy Local movement succeeding by word of mouth and example. “When someone decides that’s how they’re going to operate and talks about it. It’s kind of like watching someone and learning. It’s people walking the walk and talking the talk.” Kingston is the local spearhead of the Modern Urban Guide, a Canada-wide program that points out local businesses in the downtown cores. Not so different than what we do with Buy Local, except smaller and with a map, which is especially useful for tourists. It’s available at Love, Me.
“I think when the municipality does stuff like that, people can get on board,” says Kingston. “If businesses get together. It seems daunting, but you don’t have to buy everything at local businesses, just the stuff that makes a difference. Books, gifts and toys, that kind of thing.”
And of her store, she says business is good. “We’re kicking it! It’s been three years and we’re open and we’re still here. It’s great, especially in these economic times.”
The Nova Scotia chapter of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, a network of like-minded businesses connected to support each other, has just passed its first anniversary with 145 Nova Scotia members. It may be the most coordinated effort to promote the advantages of local business. Coordinator Shannon MacLean says education is a big part of what BALLE wants to accomplish, too. “A simple thing someone could do is a 10 percent shift of money they already spend,” taking it and putting it in the pockets of local businesses, she says. “Along with that increased buying you get more people getting involved in the local industry, the trickle down affect grows exponentially. If you support independent business in that manner, they get to grow and we get a diversity of businesses offered to us. Even in manufacturing if you create a better job system. And we don’t put our money and profits on a plane and ship it out of the province.” -CK
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2010.
Nice!
The best of times, the worst of times…The worst of times is a Camden, New Jersey-like, circling the drain future where “globalization” sucks jobs, capital and hope from a community and they are replaced by guns, drugs, and rampant corruption. The best of times is a community that knows that it is much better off when the bulk of its food, energy, and commercial base is locally produced and owned. More money circulates it the local economy and it is less susceptible to external “shocks” of all kinds.