Local Quality, Local Support
I had several people last month tell me they felt helpless after hearing that the downtown restaurant blend was closing. In the next breath, more than one of them bemoaned that they hadn’t had a chance to go to the restaurant since it reopened more than a year ago.
I tried to hide a pained expression and bit my tongue. You feel helpless?
Folks, if you want to help locally-owned, flood-affected businesses, don’t sit around assuming some government program is coming to the rescue. And don’t sit around feeling helpless. You have the power to help many of these businesses simply by doing business with them.
Of course, that’s not true of every single business. We could all eat oatmeal three meals a day and barely budge the bottom line at Quaker Oats. But the vast majority of businesses in the 10.2-mile flood zone aren’t Quaker Oats. They are small, family-owned, independent businesses. For many of them, the difference between enduring this difficult flood recovery and becoming a statistic like blend isn’t hundreds of new customers or tens of thousands of dollars of new monthly revenue. It’s just people like you and me deciding to do business with them. We can make a difference, not just downtown but in all the core neighborhoods on both sides of the river.
I applaud the Chamber’s buy-local initiative and the City Council’s local preference resolution. At the risk of offending some friends in suburbia, I want people to act even more parochially than that, at least for awhile during this tenuous period when the U.S. Department of Labor tells us we could lose hundreds of businesses trying to come back from flood damage. Steer clear of the big-box stores; take a break from chain restaurants; say no to national brand service centers. Believe me, they’ll hardly miss you. In fact, many of them even understand the need for the core of our community to survive. If we lose this battle, tax burdens will shift to other businesses, the customer base for everyone could erode, and the economy of the entire region could be jeopardized.
You might be pleasantly surprised at some of these businesses, too. Of the 32 downtown restaurants, for example, there’s not a chain among them. These are unique, interesting, high-quality places. No one is asking for pity purchases. There are excellent businesses, offering good service and quality products. You can find many of them listed at www.downtowncr.org and many others through resources at the Chamber of Commerce.
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