WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO SUPPORT LOCAL BUSINESSES

1.  Local Character and Prosperity

In an increasingly homogenised world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.

2.  Community Well-Being

Locally owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant towns/cities, linking neighbours in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.

3. Local Decision-Making

Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4.  Keeping Rands in the Local Economy

Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.

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 our SA economic innovation and prosperity and serves as a key means for families to move out of unemployment, low-wage jobs and also into the middle class.

7.  Public Benefits and Costs

Local stores 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 towns/cities, therefore ensuring that products don't have to transported to the town/city. This by itself help to keep the roads intact.

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.