Don’t buy local – there’s a heresy. I first wrote a tirade about the importance of buying local when Mary and I were living in Freestone, in the Pleistocene. But it was back then that I also started to have some doubts about applying the local principle with – as my friend Morrison says – too broad of a brush. The bookstore we frequented, and I use that word advisedly, started my doubt. I went in and asked for a book and where it might be and the clerk looked up at me and waved her hand and said, “We probably have it, it’s on a shelf out there.” The alternative in those days was not to go on line to buy a book, it was to go into Santa Rosa to the new Barnes and Noble. Their well-trained staff looked up the book and brought me to the shelf and showed it to me. End of Copperfields in my life. I still believe in local buying when it makes sense, especially in the food department. But in the old days when I was well-funded, I dismissed some of the arguments about the higher cost of local buying by insisting that some costs are externalized to make non-local buying appear cheap. I still believe that, and have to this day never been inside a Walmart. But now that I limp along on social security – give me a break with this externalized cost thing. Cash flow is everything. Some items are twice the amount in a local store. Some local stores like my former drug store are staffed by a horrible combination of brainless teenagers and stubborn ancients who don’t and maybe can’t listen. So I see the UPS guy often and Glenn the mailman a lot. And I switched from a very local but increasingly indifferent bank to a credit union further away – but they have a vastly superior on-line presentation. Etc Etc – I don’t know what my new slogan is yet, but it’s no longer a mindless “buy local.” More like “buy from people who listen and have some rules about how you’re treated and who come through for you consistently and who actually stock real physical items when you need them.”
