Idle ramblings- Local Business vs. Cost Effective- when to say when?

Open discussion based on some thoughts I had today. I had a collection of errands I needed to run, all of which could be accomplished at either Big Box Dispensary #1-7 or Local Business. I've long been a proponent of supporting the little guy. In a perfect world, I'd BE the little guy, happily slaving away pounding on my rock to sell shards to others looking for what wares I have to sell. 

Stop #1 was a hardware store. My choices were my locally owned Ace Hardware (for those unaware, they're all individually owned and operated. Technically all small businesses, operated as a co-op) and team orange/team blue. I'm sort of morally opposed to team blue for personal reasons, so they're out. We ended up at team orange. I wish we had gone to Ace. I was looking for a specific set of sandpaper that I KNEW Ace carried, but I was gambling on Home Depot's spray paint selection and price, because rattle can has gotten obnoxiously expensive and somewhat hard to find. My LOCAL LOCAL Ace is also brutal to get in and out of, and that definitely plays a factor. They're also sort of obnoxiously helpful, to the point of please leave me alone. But that's a personal preference thing. They're good at what they do. If you need the old school hardware guy, they have it in spades there. Pricing in my experience is kind of all over the map. MY old job was brutally expensive compared to the apron and vest- to the point sometimes even with my discount I'd go into the box. Hell, sometimes we'd walk the store amex into the box, buy THEIR E36 M3, mark it up, and turn around and sell it to our business accounts, especially if it was something they wanted right away. It was a bizarre world. 

Stop#2 was the liquor store. I  had read about a specific bottle of bourbon I needed to get my hands on. (Larceny BP batch A124) that had JUST been released. A new bottle store had opened up in town some weeks prior (oddly enough in an old True Value) and they've got a pretty deep bottle selection, and seem to be able to keep some good stuff on the shelves, plus they donate to local causes with every sale. My choice was either them or Total Wine. Total Wine would have been about $10 cheaper. Total Wine is also where all the hunters go to get the allocated stuff, so they get cleaned out almost immediately- finding this may not have happened, especially since it just won some award somewhere. Sure enough the local (goodpour.com for those interested) had what I needed. They're also headquartered out of Maitland, they donate to the cat shelter we got one of our morons from, and I'm gambling on building a relationship with these guys so they call me when the hot ticket comes in. PLUS- I've started hearing some things about the way Total Wine plays ball that I don't like, and I may be done shopping with them. 

Stop #3 was the book store- Bright Light books- and sort of what prompted this whole thread. This was totally an optional stop, brought on by my need to see this place after Mr. Wallens stopped there the other night. I had assumed it was a Christian bookstore and subsequently, not for me. (they do have an extensive theology section, if that's your game) While in there I stumbled across several books of interest (including a first edition Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and a coffee table book with a VERY comprehensive pictorial history on video game consoles up to and including the ps5. Cool book. Listed at $30 for a brand new copy. I was maybe going to buy it, and decided to do a bit of research to see more about the book- it was listed as a second edition, and there was some other information I wanted. That of course, led me to google targeting me and listing that one tropical river. It is nothing, if not  efficient. OF COURSE, the river is 30% cheaper and will drop it on my doorstep in like, a day. This isn't a right now purchase, or even something I was looking for. This is purely an "ooh, shiny object".  I ended up not buying the book from either place, on the auspice that I didn't need another coffee table book I wasn't going to look at- especially when I'd literally just ordered a video game I am never going to open the day before. (NES World Championships LE....I'll buy a digital copy to play, but I'm archiving stuff these days) and I have a whole bedroom of E36 M3 I need to sort through. 

There is also of course, my REGULAR local businesses. I've bought three bikes locally. (Well...one in pieces, and two whole ones) and one from an online bike shop. Mr. B's has gotten far more of my duckets than I'd like to admit to. We also bought a cruiser for swmbo from a place called Retro City that's opened a shop basically across the street from my house. I try to shop as local as I can on any given basis, but sometimes, $$$ wins, and after all my four paragraphs of rambling, brings me to the question- 

Where do you draw the line? How do you define when to shop local and when you're going to pony up to corporate consumerism? Is it a dollar amount? Is it the customer service? There are obviously places I won't shop at no matter the cost (I won't shop at Walmart. Has nothing to do with corporate policy, people of walmart, or anything. They put a Walmart where the Cottage Grove MN drive in used to be. It's not even Walmarts fault- The drive in couldn't keep up with the switch to digital. I don't care. No walmart). I won't support Kroger because of how the whole Lucky's thing went down.... etc etc. But this isn't me grinding an axe. This is me asking, how do you make your choices? 

It is always a tough decision.  I try to shop local (Mrs Frog is VERY active in our community) and we know which businesses are helping the community.  Some things just are not available locally.   So we go to the web if we can wait a day.

All that said, we are fairly financially well off.  I can afford to pay for some convenience.   I can value my time, so a quick trip locally is nicer than the big mess of going to a big box store.  If I was a struggling family trying to make all mends meet (i was there once) I would have to shop price.  A lot of times if you are low on income you burn time to save cash.

In regards to my business and the cost to my customers I tend to go for the best price.  That price has to include my labor time.  Many times going to my local store saves a lot of time versus the trip to the big box store and in the long run saves the customer.

As always YMMV.

I don't have a hard line/number. We shop at Walmart, but also smiths for groceries. Sometimes it's a price thing, sometimes it's a convenience thing. Both offer grocery pickup so I don't care much either way. 
Hardware? ACE is literally across the street. I went in for some washers just last night. 
Music stuff is almost exclusively local. Same with car parts. I'm lucky to have friends involved with both and prices are always comparable to online. 
 

I am a Prime member but actively avoid ordering things from Amazon. I try to discourage family from buying through temu or similar. 
 

Kind of all over the place. I suppose if I had to put a number, I'd say within reason, I'll spend 25% more to buy local. No judgement for however folks operate. And I say that number lightly. I'm pretty cheap, and more often than not, pretty broke. 

It depends on the need.

I shop my local steel place because I can buy scrap by the pound. Hell I even asked if they could get a specific size of solid aluminum, 3.5" dia x a foot, $80. Nobody else around is going to be able to get it.

Summit vs local.... Summit everyday if I can wait for it to ship. The local place is just giraffe nuts high on price because they just get their E36 M3 from motor state and mark it up even more. 
 

And the list can go on....

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

I ABHOR Temu. Amazon has turned into Temu lite- you REALLY have to check what you're buying otherwise you're getting GABLOO E36 M3. I buy E36 M3 because I only want to buy it once. 

I try to shop local vs big box at least 80% of the time. I value time and service more than price so if I go in, find what I need by asking, and be out, that's my hot button. I will also pay for quality over price (especially with appliances) but my tool boxes are Harbor Freight.....

I have never been in a Walmart.

We're all over the place on local vs online vs big box when shopping. 

I'll buy from the local hardware/feed store for small quantities, chicken feed, dog food, grill pellets, propane, and spray paint/sandpaper. They have limited plumbing and electrical for large jobs, and I have boxes of copper and pvc fittings and valves, and electric outlets and switches, so I go to my shed first, then the big box if it's more than 1-2 pieces or after 6:00 when they close.

The only option for lumber locally is the box store, so they get the business for that. Blue or orange depends on what I'm buying and who has all the different things in stock. 

Sporting goods start with local "play it again" and if they don't have it then Dicks, Walmart, etc. Hockey tends to be the local Pure Hockey, they have great help and good selection, although skates have been a small family shop about an hour away to get their expertise in fitting skates. 

Auto parts vary a lot. Sometimes it's RA if there's no chance I'll need to return it, other wise it's the local chain, since they are open nights and weekends. 

Groceries are the local Market 32. We used to go to the butcher in town before they closed if we wanted something special, or needed something to cook that night. Otherwise meat gets bought at the supermarket just due to convenience.

We use Amazon for some things, like I have out coffee k-cups delivered regularly (same price as BJs), and other things that aren't readily available locally or when we don't have time to go. 

I work for a non-profit arts organization.  (Theater Technical Director).  The bottom line for me is that I need to make a set for a musical on a massive stage, and my self-imposed budgets are insanely small.  I have to mind the bottom line for work, so (having previously worked for the orange store) I have friends there who help me out with some oops paint that wasn't actually oopsed, or a phone call about a tool on clearance, or "oh, I forgot to add the delivery charge, wink wink."  I have also been able to negotiate prices on some things when I buy in bulk.  For work, the answer is cheapest, and who has it in stock, which almost always means orange

For myself, I'm torn.  I did a major renovation to my house during the pandemic.  Nearly all of the mom and pops around here had anything I needed in the quantities I wanted, and what they did have was 50% more cost to buy... for the same stuff as the orange store.   My other choice was a commercial supply.  When they just sold 25 bunks of subfloor OSB to a massive home-builder and a homeowner walks in asking for 9 sheets, they treat you like a burden.  Not always, but it's the equivalent of walking into a speed shop with a backwards hat and a vape pen asking if they sell Maxspeedingrods coilovers for a 97 Altima.

I hate giving my money to the orange multi-national company that sucked my soul dry for 3 years, but it's hard to either pay way more for less selection, or be treated like a noob at the builder's supply places.

Put it this way... I have a mom and pop hardware about 1/2 mile away from my house, and I can't tell you how many times I drove 6 miles to the orange store after trying to get what I wanted at and supporting a local business.  It's hard when I pull up to my local hardware business looking for 20 sheets of cabinet grade 3/4 ply, they have two warped ones on the shelf that have been there since Reagan was in office, and they're $65 each when I can go to the orange store where they have 255 fresh ones in stock for $45

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

That's a very fair assessment of the local. When I worked at the place with the helpful hardware folks- I was helpful. Almost too helpful sometimes. I would actively tell people to not buy lumber from us because our numbers were so bad. Especially when pandflation hit, a 2x4x8 was more than my hourly wage. It was insane. I realize it was well and truly outside of my control- We were pricing according to what the warehouse was selling to us- but berkeley it would have been cheaper for us to drive the van down to orange, buy a pallet and stick it in out shelf that way. In fact i'm pretty sure we did once. On the other hand, orange rarely has the obscure hardware i'm looking for, and if I need to frankenstein some threads, ol boy at the local has just about everything out of the McMaster-Carr catalog since the dawn of time in stock. It's pretty impressive. 

Whatever is the better Value. That's very subjective.

Total price factors into value.

I'd say that time and mental health are probably the biggest drivers of value. This means convenience/location and customer service factor in heavily.

But sometimes this means going to Blue because they're right down the street and I can place orders for things online.

I always prefer to go to the local Do It Best affiliated hardware store if I can.  Unfortunately, they close at 1700 on weekdays and are only open from 0800-1200 on Saturday.  They also have a lot of stuff, but invariably I'll need at least one thing that they don't carry and I hate to have to make multiple stops if I can avoid it.

I'm willing to pay more for knowledge, service, quality, and availability.  But if I'm going to get the same cheap Chinese crap no matter where I go, I can pick it up today with an equalish drive, and I'm in a "I know more than you" situation, then I'll go for the big box.  Especially when I can check the big box website and see if the local store has it in stock so I don't waste a drive.

We've got a "local" grocer in town that's now owned by some out-of-state conglomerate.  I muchly prefer Kroger - which is also local - because that local place is just awful.  It's dingy, the produce blows, their store brand is inedible, and the selection is crap.

At least people know to shop around. Back when we had a real local lumber yard, their wood was better and on top of that cheaper than the box stores. And the delivered. Sadly, they retired and the new "local" lumber kind of sucks- especially the quality of the wood. 
 

But we do our best to get local. Even going to the farm market store (picture a small grocers with local farmed goods- kind of a permanent farmers market). 

Awareness is the first thing.  So many people shop the big box without any thought as to the ideological leanings of the corporation or the notion of supporting a small business.  For them, it's mostly about convenience, or so I suppose. 

I have a small, local hardware and a plumbing supply place that I visit first if I have a need that I know they can fill.  Even so, sometimes I'm in the big blue box.  More often, I'm ordering from Bezos because with free prime shipping, it's worth it to me to have exactly what I want in a day, delivered to my doorstep, at a price no local retailer can likely touch.  I feel guilty about it, but I spend way too much money at Amazon.

I do think Amazon has severely hurt their image by carrying sixteen different Chinese-made doohickeys with nonsensical brands like Bogodoo and Goobadah.  I recently ordered a stamped steel reinforcement for my garage door, upon which I was installing an opener.  I chose the Clopay branded one for six or so dollars more than the goofy-branded stuff.  Part is very satisfactory and remarkably heavy gauge.  Still made in China though.  And I don't know that it's any better than the off-brand stuff.

I'm aware, and I'll gladly spend more, but my time is generally the deciding factor.  The Dead Kennedy's nailed it when they named their 1987 release "Give me Convenience, or Give me Death."  It's a mantra for the Age of Materialism, which seems to intensify with each passing year.

wae said:

I always prefer to go to the local Do It Best affiliated hardware store if I can.  Unfortunately, they close at 1700 on weekdays and are only open from 0800-1200 on Saturday.  They also have a lot of stuff, but invariably I'll need at least one thing that they don't carry and I hate to have to make multiple stops if I can avoid it.

I'm willing to pay more for knowledge, service, quality, and availability.  But if I'm going to get the same cheap Chinese crap no matter where I go, I can pick it up today with an equalish drive, and I'm in a "I know more than you" situation, then I'll go for the big box.  Especially when I can check the big box website and see if the local store has it in stock so I don't waste a drive.

We've got a "local" grocer in town that's now owned by some out-of-state conglomerate.  I muchly prefer Kroger - which is also local - because that local place is just awful.  It's dingy, the produce blows, their store brand is inedible, and the selection is crap.

I'm pretty much the same way.  I think my conundrum is that I already have the knowledge, so I can buy the same Weyerhauser 2x4 at HD for $3, or $5 from Ace.  It was probably even on the same truck.  They probably dropped 9 bunks at HD and 1 bunk at Ace.

If I do need advice on a new task, it is nice to have a knowledgeable person to help, but (at least in my town) the HD is packed full of retired contractors, and the Ace is staffed with high school kids.

Edit to add:  My summary is that I strongly prefer shopping local.  It's just that my local shops lack both the experience and pricing to make it an attractive thing.  I do support a local farm.  They offer a CSA, but I just buy from them when I can.  If I need a tomato in August, I call them instead of the big grocery store.  If I need a pork belly, I call them in the spring or fall when they're butchering.

In reply to Mndsm :

Ha, I also thought it was a Christian bookstore at first. 

I blissfully live a 20 minute drive from Blue and Orange stores, while the local Tru Value is five minutes away. And they have the Aisle Of Happiness:  those endless drawers of stuff you can use to fab things with.

I do order quite a bit from the jungle web site. It's just too easy not to. But if my choices are mostly Galoob crap I shop around.

I never shop at Walmart. We do have a Costco that gets a lot of my business, and a local grocery chain that has much higher quality stuff than the Giant/Weis conglomerates.

I buy a fair amount of parts from my local NAPA. I avoid Autozone and EdVance like they have the plague. We don't have O'Reillys around here. But I will order from Summit when I need stuff NAPA doesn't have and RockAuto when it's just waaaay cheaper and I can wait. I'm one of those people who has not had a bad experience with RA...so far.

I struggle with this too, especially with car/home products. I would ideally like to keep my money "in the community". But what does that actually mean when literally everything is made overseas or from the same generic supplier? I'm just picking who to give my middleman markup to? 

If I had the option of buying something that cost X more and had X more quality and was made somewhere with human rights, then that's an actual decision to consider. But 99% of the time it's the same cheap crap with a different price. In that case I'd rather keep my dollars as local as possible - in my own wallet. 

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

If I do need advice on a new task, it is nice to have a knowledgeable person to help, but (at least in my town) the HD is packed full of retired contractors, and the Ace is staffed with high school kids.

In my experience the Ace is high school kids and the HD is retirees who once renovated a bathroom poorly in the mid-80's. Get with the times, I'm trying to renovate my bathroom poorly in the 2020's!

To muddy the waters a bit, when do you *stop* rooting for the local business that is expanding? If a restaurant opens a second location, we cheer. 102nd location, we boo. Lowe's for example is headquartered two exits away from me, so they are *technically* local and a huge employer in the zip code if not the biggest. Supporting them checks a lot of the boxes for a small business in that you are employing a lot of locals when you shop there. ACE is closer to my house but routinely disappoints me. At best, they'll have something the same dubious quality as Amazon but with certainly a higher price. At worst, they usually just don't have what I am looking for unless it is a bolt. They're great for that. Expensive for 1, but I don't have to buy 100. Ditto above about the kids working there being the AutoZone cashiers of the home improvement world, so it is not like there's any value being added. 

In reply to cyow5 :

For me, Lowe's died when they stopped acting like a local business.  At my Lowe's, I get mundane quality, high prices, and lousy service.  Frankly, I can get that anywhere.

In reply to ddavidv :

My local NAPA is almost useless, despite being right in the middle of dealer row, and having what seems like plenty of space for inventory. If I need something on a Saturday, it's almost certainly going to be Tuesday before they can get what I need. And they're not cheap.

I only ever try that NAPA at all because I drive right past it on the way to Advance, which almost always has the part I need in stock.

I will go out of my way to shop local in all things. A family of 5 on one income means I have to speak with every dollar that goes out my door, to make sure they are working hard for me. That being said, I'd rather send 1.25 dollars to the local ACE than 1.0 dollars to the orange hoard. I have come to HATE Home Depot. They used to have someone in every department that knows what they are talking about. Years ago I was unable to find one orange-aproned moron in the whole place (sorry, feelings coming out). I called the stores phone number to ask the customer service desk to send somene to isle X to help me. 
Home Depot has the walmart mentality. Swoop in with low prices and (unlike walmart) decent customer service. Once you've run the small guys out of town fire all the people that help the customer and fill the main front and back isles with soo many pallets of crap that I can't get a lumber cart through the store. 
Screw Home Depot.
 

That being said, the little guy is much more apt to care about the community because our success is his/her success. Home-Mart-Lowes-etc. are not vested in the community. If the store fails or outlives it's usefulness, they close the doors and move on. No worries. 

We've lived through a great example of this in the past month or so.

The Ioniq 5 my wife just got came with two years of free Electrify America charging. Charging at home is cheap, but it's not free, and free is cheaper than cheap, so she's been hitting the EA charger a couple miles from our house, which is located right at the entrance to the Walmart garden center. 

She's an avid landscaper, and with 3 acres that she's determined to turn into a State Park, she goes through a LOT or materials. She normally buys at Ace, or local independent garden centers, but on a recent charge trip she took a stroll through the WalMart garden center and was blown away. Prices low enough to make you willing to shop there. Like, "Hey I can pay the cable bill just on the savings here every month." At that point setting aside your morals and take the bargains. 

I wish we had the resources to tell all the big guys to go screw, but we have bills to pay, too, and those bills are easier to pay when we can more easily exercise some thrift, which is hard with a lot of out locals. This is kind of a weird area, too, where we're not big enough to be a big town but too big to be a small town, so many of our local businesses really aren't that great and have very little competition from other independents. So our market is, unfortunately, prime picking for big box vultures.

In reply to JG Pasterjak :

Think of it this way. With the money you save on gardening supplies, it makes going out to eat more affordable. National trends reflect this. People are going out to local bars and restaurants more than ever despite inflation. Amozon can't commodify the in-person dining experience...yet.

It's whether the service outweighs the price difference. 

For things that do not require service, I'm going with the cheaper option. 

For things that do, I'm going with whoever offers better service. 

This is why 9/10 I do all my bike related stuff at home with online sourced parts. I have never found bike shop service to be worthy of the price, except for maybe wheel building and suspension rebuilds.