Your support of the local businesses can and does make a difference!Home

  
.

Why Shop Local?

 

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity

Grundy County is a unique mix of people, places and products.  By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Grundy County’s unique mix.

 

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 that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will 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 more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

 

5. Job 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 America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

 

7. Public Benefits and Costs

Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

 

8. Environmental Sustainability

Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing 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

A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

 		    
 

The Grundy County Chamber along with the GEDC, MDDP, Morris Daily Herald and Grundy Broadcasters are forming a network of local business owners, non-profit leaders, and community members who are committed to cultivating a vibrant local economy by promoting businesses that have made a commitment to our communities.

 Our objectives are simple:

•  Educate consumers about the economic, social and environmental benefits of supporting local businesses.

•  Increase the amount of goods purchased from locally.

•  Connect businesses to one another and facilitate communication and collaboration between them.

•  Provide materials to businesses to assist in developing local campaigns.

 

 

What can you do?

•   Think about where you buy your goods and services—check into local options.

•   Gas up your vehicle in your home town.

•   Buy Chamber Gift Certificates for employee awards, client thank you gifts & personal gift giving.