By Robert Dean
Carter County Times
Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your cash. The guy lives on a yacht so big it has a baby yacht inside it to run errands. Bezos’s yacht is so massive it can’t dock at most luxury marinas; it has to park near cargo ships and tankers like it’s an overgrown cruise liner that wandered away from port. It’s a billionaire’s sail-powered skyscraper no harbor knows what to do with.
You know who doesn’t have a yacht? The mom-and-pop restaurant in town that’d love to see you stop in for lunch when you’re out buying gifts. The coffee shop that’d be thrilled if you grabbed two lattes and maybe a gift card as a stocking stuffer. This Christmas, think about looking on Etsy or walking into a real store instead of defaulting to Amazon. Studies show that for every $100 spent at a small business, about $48 stays local, while Amazon leaves behind about zero. Amazon drains a town’s tax base; small businesses fund the schools, parks, and services communities actually rely on. And not for nothing—people work in these places, and if you haven’t noticed, the economy isn’t exactly humming.
Main Street matters more than Walmart. And just like Bezos, the fine folks in Bentonville have plenty of our money. When you shop at a small business, you help keep storefronts filled, sidewalks lit, and downtowns alive. In towns under 50,000 people, locally owned businesses generate two-thirds of the local economy. And when you tell the small business owner your kid’s sick and you need to leave early, you won’t get some corporate nonsense about “scheduling conflicts.”
Look, for working parents, I get it: shopping on your phone is faster. I enjoy scrolling from the toilet myself. But these creeps already have too much of our money, time, and data. Meanwhile, the old lady running the used bookstore will remember your name, set aside the good stuff, and actually care if you come back. She’s part of the community. Amazon isn’t. Walmart has your shopping data. The waitress down at the diner, she knows you hate onions.
Shopping small should be about an address within the community, not just a shipping address. I know money is tight. Amazon and Walmart sell cheaper but what’s more important: a lot of cheap things or a Christmas that’s curated with a few fewer gifts but ones that you can feel good about five years from now? We’ve all got way too much crap, anyhow.
Shopping in person is one of the last social activities we haven’t completely outsourced to our phones. We already stream movies at home, order food from apps, swipe through everything from dates to dog walkers. Don’t let Christmas shopping join that list—go to the mall, go downtown, drop a few bucks in a local merchant’s till. You may run into neighbors or meet someone who makes your heart beat a little quicker. We cannot become slaves to swiping away our lives. The more technology-based we become, the worse off we are for it. I want to be around people who share my experience rather than sit all afternoon on the couch. Do you want to live in a town of warehouses and data centers or places where people can at least look one another in the eye?
Buying small means giving power back to actual people, not to corporations that see you as friction in the checkout process. Supporting small business might mean thinking differently this year: maybe you don’t buy your mom another blouse; maybe you get her a year of lawn service instead. Your old man will probably thank you come July.
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