Jump Start Your Business Recovery by Rallying Your Local Community
By Eric Groves
Alignable.com
We’ve changed in many ways over the past eight weeks. We shifted into survival mode, adopted social distancing norms, and found new ways to purchase products and services remotely. These purchases were predominantly done through remote online stores with the convenience of delivery right to our front doors.
This change in human behavior has resulted in Our Money – Leaving Our Communities faster than ever before.
We need to join forces and reverse this trend fast
For local businesses across the nation – Galveston County included — to survive and recover, our money needs to circulate as many times as possible around our communities before it catches the bus out of town. AMIBA created this chart to show what happens to our money based on where it’s spent:
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A hundred dollars spent on Amazon or similar online store results in $1 staying in the community (if the delivery driver happens to live nearby). Compared to the same $100 spent at an independent local business where over $60 stays in and circulating around the community.
To rebuild our local economies, we need our money to stay here in our communities. Shop Small Saturday in November isn’t going to solve this problem. We need a long-term My Money Stays Local movement to have a fighting chance.
So, if you want your community to recover, and we all do, then you are going to have to jump on board and get loud for the next 12 months at least.
What if all 5 million of the small business owners on Alignable (including the 279 located in the Texas City area) worked together within their communities? Maybe printing out signs and putting them on your storefronts, in email campaigns to local customers, and posted them across all their social media simply saying: #MyMoneyStaysLocal in My Community. I don’t care if you rip this off, change it to your heart’s content, or even call it your own. Just Do It ;-).
If we want local consumers and others to follow our lead, we are going to have to back it up with our actions. Every day, we need to go out of our way to buy products and services from other local businesses, suppliers, and manufacturers.
Imagine every local storefront in your town with a sign showing how much of what they spend stays in their community…
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Once we get going on this, we can bring the local consumers into the mix too. Imagine the tee shirt sales alone for #MyMoneyStaysLocal in Falmouth, MA (where I live) for the over 30,000 communities here on Alignable. Again… please rip this off for your own community!
