My 10 Prime Reasons to Shop Local 💖 ~ By Jason Solarek at Bridge in New York, NY

Jason Solarek @ Bridge
September 16, 2024 • 7:44 PM

My 10 Prime Reasons to Shop Local 💖

A poster by Shop Local Raleigh.

Imports, often from China, that come directly from the country and land at the consumers' doorsteps are soaring. In 2024, there will be 1 billion shipments. These 1 billion purchases often cut out the U.S. supply chain, including U.S. manufacturers and retailers. Source: The Wall. St. Journal.

Amazon quit cooperating with NYC after picking the city to build its HQ2.

An illustration showcasing how China and Amazon are intertwined. Illustration by Doug Chayka

Illustration by Jason Solarek

Amazon packages overwhelming an NYC sidewalk and street.

Amazon truck disrupting public transit.

Jason Solarek @ Bridge
September 16, 2024 • 7:44 PM

My 10 Prime Reasons to Shop Local 💖

From selfish reasons like instant gratification to macro reasons like stopping war mongers, here are 10 reasons to make you feel good about skipping Prime Day everyday.

I saw this poster on the website of Shop Local Raleigh. Thank you for inspiring us and other communities. (You’re invited to see the poster here:
https://shoplocalraleigh.org/care-2/why-shop-local/)

A notable thing on the above page is the poster’s reasons don’t match the text-based list below it. I liked the text reasons more.

If I were to make a top 10 list, I’d include:

Instant gratification. Don’t wait for a shipment. Pick it up, pay for it, and walk out.
Accuracy. How often have you bought something online and it didn’t meet your expectations? It was too big, small, poor quality, or the wrong color.
Easy returns. Making a return in a store is simple. Many people don’t want to return an online purchase, so they end up keeping something they don’t like and won’t use. They therefore lose money.
Discovery. How often have you gone into a store and discovered similar products you’d not considered and instead bought one of them? That happens to me at Best Buy all the time.
Keep your street, town, and city cool. Cool places have businesses and employed people. They are busy, active, buzzing, and energetic. Amazon enables shoppers to bypass local shops and therefore hurts them…Amazon therefore does not help your street, town, or city be cool.
Pay the same as what you’d pay online. Many brick-and-mortar stores have price matching. Plus, you can save on shipping.
Avoid waste. Online orders often produce more shipping waste (big boxes, lots of plastic wrapping, etc.).
Stop monopolies from gaining more ground. Amazon and big tech companies are bullies that keep growing. They also lobby to keep laws like Section 230 that hurt kids. Shopping at Amazon helps keep dangerous laws on the books and helps keep the web a dirtier place.
Stop fueling countries that hate America. China and other countries heavily rely on Amazon to ship goods into the U.S. and bypass U.S. manufacturing and retailers. Amazon (as well as SHEIN and Temu) use loopholes to ship goods right from their Chinese factories to U.S. consumers. That enriches China, which supports Russia in the war in Ukraine, and defunds the U.S. Shopping on Amazon may be an indirect way to buy a bullet, put it in a Russian rifle, and fire it at our ally Ukraine. (Read an article from The Atlantic sharing how Amazon is packed with goods made in China and sold by Chinese retailers: https://www.shoplocal.org/news.cfm/23572/The-new-threat-Chinese-apps-backed-with-Chinese-factories)
Jeff Bezos and Amazon aren’t nice people. They justify stealing and scheming in the name of helping lower prices—but that’s a smoke screen to get what they want: more revenue for themselves. For this reason, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon. Plus, I can speak from personal experience. Three examples come to mind. 1. Amazon delivery trucks are illegally parked every other block here in New York City. The trucks drive in from outside the city, say, New Jersey, park all day on an NYC street, get a $150 ticket, and consider the $150 fine their "parking garage" fee. Our streets weren't designed to be virtual warehouses. Parking fines aren't parking fees. 2. Amazon picked NYC as the home of its HQ2 (second headquarters) after a year long competition with 200+ cities. Upon learning it would have to work with the local Queens community in building the HQ there, Amazon quit and chose to not build the HQ2. The logic may be: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Amazon can park its New Jersey trucks in our city for $150 per truck vs. building the new HQ2. 3. Amazon is scouring our clients’ websites almost every hour copying our clients’ product data and seeking to use it against them. For example, it will copy a small store’s website prices for item X and then ensure it offers that same item X at 5% less. Amazon sends our server surges of page-scrapping bot traffic and this slows down our client’s store from loading for real shoppers. Amazon is simultaneously getting a competitive pricing advantage and undermining our ability to offer a fast website experience. Lesson: Buying from people with integrity has immediate and long-term benefits to you and those around you. …Hey, at the least you likely know me if you’re reading this. So don’t support these a-holes. Thanks.